Isaac Toast Brand Guidelines: A 1995 Start, a Sweet House Sauce and a Smiling Toast

A one-person business that became a franchise.

Isaac Toast is a South Korean chain of toasted sandwiches, run by Isaac Co., Ltd. Its story begins in 1995, when Kim Ha-kyung started selling toast as a one-person business. The company’s own history and Korean Wikipedia both give that year, and Marketing-Interactive, the Singapore marketing title, repeated it in October 2017, describing the chain as founded in 1995. Franchising followed in 2003. Korean Wikipedia says the trademark was registered that year and that the company Isaac Co., Ltd. was set up in 2004; Digital Times, writing in April 2025, described the same path, from a personal business in 1995 to franchising from 2003.

Kim still leads the business. In July 2021 The Asia Business Daily named her as chief executive of Isaac Co., Ltd., the operator of Isaac Toast, and the company’s website lists her as its representative today. In a greeting on that website she writes that she began the business on her own in 1995, and that the first franchised store came about when she helped a couple she had met to set up on their own. She links the name Isaac to its meaning of joy and laughter. Those are the company’s own words.

The company works from more than one city. Its website lists a Seoul business headquarters in Songpa district and further offices in Daejeon and Daegu. Korean Wikipedia tracks how the network grew: about 700 franchised stores and an opening in Macau in 2014; Malaysia and the Philippines in 2017; more than 800 stores, with Singapore and Hong Kong, in 2018; and more than 900 in 2023. The company’s own timeline also marks 2023 as the year it passed 900 franchised stores, and both Digital Times in April 2025 and Bizwatch in September 2026 put the domestic network at about 900 stores. Digital Times added that the company has kept a policy of charging franchisees no joining fee.

Toast, a sweet sauce and new formats.

Isaac Toast sells hot toasted sandwiches. Mothership, the Singapore news site, described them in 2020 as typically including eggs and thick cuts of chicken or beef, and the company says that what sets its toast apart is a sweet sauce it developed itself. The current menu on its website runs from the Ham Cheese and Ham Special toasts to a French Brioche range and Jambon Cheese Bagels, with sets, side dishes such as potato pops and coleslaw, and soft drinks and coffee.

The sauce is close to a trade secret, Bizwatch wrote in September 2026, reporting that it traces back to a schoolgirl customer who asked for something sweet in her toast, a story still retold decades later, and that the sauce used in stores contains no kiwi, despite the many copycat recipes built on kiwi jam. In April 2026 The Asia Business Daily reported that the company had announced the “Isaac Toast Sauce,” also nicknamed the “Kiwi Sauce” or the “Magic Sauce,” as a product for overseas markets only, keeping it out of Korean shops so that it would not compete with its franchisees. By September 2026, Bizwatch reported, the bottled sauce was on sale through Shinsegae Duty Free: at Incheon Airport’s Terminal 1 from April, online and in Myeongdong from May, and at Terminal 2 from July. It was still not sold in the franchise stores themselves, in supermarkets or in convenience stores.

The company has tried other formats. In July 2021 it opened the first kitchen of Isaac Burger, a handmade burger brand, near Sinsa Station in Seoul, The Asia Business Daily reported, drawing on its years of running Isaac Toast. The company’s timeline lists “Isaac Toast Lab” stores opened in 2022 in Songdo, near Hanti Station and in Daejeon, and a 2023 “Ver 3.0” store format that added fried items to the menu. It also lists collaborations: a Buldak toast with the noodle maker Samyang Foods in 2020, and character goods with Nexon’s MapleStory and with Pokémon in later years.

Korean café and food chains.

South Korea’s café, bakery and quick-meal chains present themselves first through the street. Most are franchise networks, so a shopfront, a cup and a menu board have to look the same in thousands of places run by different owners. When the Korea Times reported in January 2025 that one coffee chain’s rebrand was on hold, the reason it gave was franchisees’ reluctance to pay for new store fittings: in a franchise system, a new look is also a shared bill.

Menus carry much of the identity. The chains in this group name their dishes and drinks rather than describing them in general terms, and abroad they lean on Korean flavours: dalgona lattes, sikhye, roasted sweet potato, injeolmi and black sesame cakes, misutgaru drinks and street snacks such as hotteok and bungeoppang, according to press reports on their stores in Malaysia, Laos and the United States. Cakes, toast, porridge, lunchboxes and burgers each give a chain its own signature.

Ownership is described plainly in the companies’ own pages and in the business press. Some chains belong to large food groups, some to private equity funds and some to individual owners; a single brand can pass through several of these in two decades. Store counts are published by the companies and repeated by the press with dates, and the numbers change quickly in a market the Korea Times described as split between premium and budget tiers.

Expansion abroad takes two main forms in these reports: a master franchise, in which a local partner runs the stores, or a subsidiary that runs them directly. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now, how its stores and menus present it at home and abroad, and which facts rest only on the company’s own word.

A smiling toast in red and butter.

Abroad, the record is mixed. Marketing-Interactive reported in October 2017 that a franchisee had secured the rights for Malaysia and Thailand and had chosen klia2, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, for its first outlet in the region. In Singapore, Mothership reported, the chain arrived in July 2018, closed its Waterway Point outlet on 25 August 2020 and closed its last outlet, at Plaza Singapura, on 28 September 2020. English Wikipedia lists branches in Macau, Taiwan and Malaysia and notes that the Singapore outlets have closed.

The company’s website sets out its identity in some detail. It describes the Isaac Toast logo as a wordmark with brisk, lively stroke endings beside a smiling toast symbol, meant to make the brand feel brighter and friendlier, and shows it in basic, vertical and wordmark-only versions. Its colours are named Isaac Toast Red and Isaac Toast Butter: a warm butter-yellow base with red as the accent, supported by a light grey and a dark brown. The parent company has a separate corporate identity, a lowercase logotype that the company says expresses a humble attitude, set above a wide symbol drawn as a “generous bowl,” in a deep red paired with a pale blue it calls Trust Blue.

For a design guide, Isaac Toast shows how a sandwich chain can be built around one sauce and one friendly symbol, and how a brand can keep its signature product in its own stores while selling it abroad. Compare Paris Baguette, the Korean bakery chain that took its name overseas, and Lotteria, another Korean quick-service chain. For this guide we use a tomato red and a butter yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Isaac Toast’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.