GS25 Favorites Land at Donki in Japan

A small piece of the Korean convenience-store aisle has landed inside another distinctly Asian retail institution: Don Quijote.

This month, Don Quijote stores across Japan have begun carrying 20 products from GS25, South Korea’s largest convenience-store chain. The collection comes from youus, GS25’s main private-label brand, and includes cup noodles, snacks and the colorful pouch drinks that are a fixture of Korean convenience stores.

For shoppers in Japan, it means some of the items normally associated with a convenience-store stop in Seoul can now be picked up during a trip to Donki.

The wider rollout follows the Japanese launch earlier this year of Omori Kimchi Jjigae Ramen, a longtime top seller in GS25’s cup-noodle category. Strong sales at Don Quijote prompted GS Japan, GS Retail and Don Quijote parent Pan Pacific International Holdings to considerably expand the selection.

The new lineup includes seven instant-noodle products, led by several variations on the Omori series. The original Omori Kimchi Jjigae Ramen comes with a separate pack of kimchi aged for three years, and the series had sold more than 35 million units in South Korea by the end of 2025.

But perhaps the most unmistakably Korean-konbini additions are the pouch drinks.

At convenience stores across South Korea, customers commonly buy a sealed pouch of coffee, tea or fruit drink and pour it into a separate cup filled with ice. Don Quijote is bringing that format to Japan with watermelon ade, mango ade, strawberry ade, peach iced tea, mango iced tea and blue lemonade. The ice cups are sold separately.

There is also a considerably stranger entry: Pyongyang cold-noodle broth, a beef-based soup sold in the same pouch format.

Snacks round out the 20-item selection, including Dip Chocoletta and Pistachio Chocoletta — part of a series that has sold more than 30 million units in South Korea — along with sweet-potato snacks and truffle potato chips.

Participating Don Quijote stores are grouping the products into dedicated GS25 sections, effectively compressing part of a Korean convenience-store shelf into a Japanese discount store.

You still have to go to Korea for the full GS25 experience. But for the ramen, snacks and an ice-cup drink, Donki is suddenly a much shorter trip.