Drop a small coin-shaped tablet into a pot of simmering water. What dissolves into the broth over the next few minutes is not a concentrate, not a bouillon cube with a list of additives running down the side of the box. It is sixteen ingredients — six seafoods, ten vegetables, all sourced from Korea, none of them treated with heat or chemicals — pressed into a shape roughly the size of a large button. The broth that results tastes the way Korean broth is supposed to taste: deep, clean, and specific in a way that is difficult to explain until you've had it.
This tablet, called Jayeon Hanal (자연한알) — "one tablet of nature" — was introduced in 2016 as the world's first coin-shaped freeze-dried natural seasoning. At the time, the idea of compressing whole, unprocessed ingredients into a solid tablet without any binding agents or additives was new enough to warrant a patent. It wasn't long before the format became a category of its own: what Koreans now casually refer to as "coin broth" is a fixture in supermarkets and home shopping channels across the country. Trunas made it first.
Korean cooking is, at its foundation, a cuisine of layered aromatics and patient broth. A properly made Korean stock — the kind that serves as the base for doenjang jjigae, a fermented soybean paste stew, or a bowl of seolleongtang, a long-simmered ox bone soup — can take hours and require a dozen ingredients most Western kitchens don't stock. This is the culinary problem that a small company near the Namhan River in central Korea decided to solve, and the solution they arrived at was unlike anything that had been done before.
What Freeze-Drying Actually Does
To understand Trunas, you first have to understand what freeze-drying is — and more importantly, what it isn't. Most dried food products use heat to remove moisture: a process that is efficient but brutal, stripping ingredients of the volatile compounds that carry their flavor and aroma. Some products take a middle path, using partial freeze-drying alongside heat — enough to market the method, not enough to preserve what matters. Trunas uses neither. Every product is fully freeze-dried: ingredients are flash-frozen at extremely low temperatures, then placed in a vacuum chamber where the ice converts directly into vapor — bypassing the liquid stage entirely. No heat. No shortcuts. The result is a product that loses its moisture but retains almost everything else: color, structure, aroma, and nutritional content, held in a kind of suspended state until water is reintroduced.
It sounds clinical. The result is anything but. A freeze-dried slice of cheongyang, the small, fiery green chili pepper that gives Korean stews their characteristic heat, looks almost exactly like a fresh one. Rehydrate it, and it smells like one too. This fidelity to the original ingredient — not approximating it, but genuinely preserving it — is the standard Trunas has held itself to since it began, and the reason the company's products read less like a convenience shortcut and more like a form of preservation.
A Korean Pioneer Near the Namhan River
Trunas — the name itself says it: True Nature As It Is. Based near the Namhan River in Chungju, Dr. Sangsik Kim built the company around a single, uncompromising idea: that food should be preserved exactly as nature made it. What followed was anything but quiet. Trunas developed the world's first coin-shaped freeze-dried natural seasoning — a compressed tablet made from 100% whole ingredients with no chemical additives — and in doing so, created an entirely new product category in Korean cooking.
That product — Jayeon Hanal — has sold over six million units across home shopping, online, and export channels, finding its way into home kitchens across Korea and into restaurants in New York. But its real significance was what it set in motion. The success of that first coin gave Trunas both the credibility and the technology to expand. Today the brand spans four lines: Jayeon Hanal, the original broth tablet; Jayeon Hanpo (자연한포), a powder-format broth for those who prefer it that way; Ganpyeon Yangnyeom (간편양념), a range of aromatic tablets and slices — garlic, ginger, cheongyang chili, green onion — built around the same no-prep convenience; and Jayeon Gotgan (자연곳간), seasonal namul greens, washed five times and briefly blanched before freeze-drying. Each line a different entry point into the Korean kitchen. All of them made to the same standard as the original.
The company holds patents on its tablet-pressing technology and meets the food safety standards that matter most to international markets: HACCP certification, FSSC22000 — the global benchmark for food safety management systems — FDA registration in the United States, and official vegan certification. For a product that travels as far as Trunas does, from Korean home kitchens to restaurant supply chains in New York, that kind of credentialing is less a formality than a guarantee. The result is a product range that begins, as Korean cooking itself does, with the aromatics.
The Aromatics, Preserved
Garlic is the most essential aromatic in the Korean kitchen — it appears in the majority of Korean dishes, raw or cooked, as a paste or left whole. Fresh garlic requires peeling and chopping; jarred pre-minced garlic typically contains salt and preservatives that alter the flavor. The One Tablet Chopped Garlic sidesteps both problems. Made from 100% Korean garlic with no additives, one tablet dissolved in water yields clean, fresh-tasting minced garlic that behaves exactly as the real thing should.
The same logic applies to ginger. Korean ginger is sharper and more pungent than varieties common in Western markets, and it appears not just in Korean cooking but across East and Southeast Asian cuisines. One Tablet Ground Ginger, additive-free and made from 100% Korean ginger, offers the same immediacy — no peeling, no grating, just a tablet and a drop of water. And then there is cheongyang: the small green chili that is arguably Korea's most important source of heat, sharper than a jalapeño and cleaner than most dried chilies. Both a tablet form and a sliced version are available for different uses — the slices work well as a garnish where the visual matters as much as the heat.
These three — garlic, ginger, cheongyang — form the aromatic backbone of a Korean pantry, and green onion quietly completes it. In Korean cooking, green onion is less a featured ingredient than a constant presence: it goes into the broth, finishes the stew, and tops nearly every dish that comes out of the pan. The sliced green onion is the kind of ingredient you reach for without thinking — noticed only when it's missing. Having all four reliably on hand, in a form that doesn't spoil or require prep, changes the way Korean cooking becomes possible away from Korea.
Building a Korean Broth, One Tablet at a Time
If aromatics are the starting point, broth is the backbone. Korean cuisine has a deep tradition of stock-making — anchovy broth, kelp broth, bone broth — each requiring specific ingredients and the kind of time that most home cooks outside Korea struggle to source and commit to. The One Tablet Natural Seafood Stock, Trunas's flagship product, compresses sixteen ingredients into a single tablet: six seafoods — dried pollack, bonito, anchovy, kelp, clam, and tuna — alongside ten vegetables including radish, burdock, lotus root, shiitake, and green onion. Two tablets dissolved in water produce a broth that is, by any reasonable measure, the real thing.
For cooks who prefer to cook without seafood, the Vegan Broth Tablet takes a similarly comprehensive approach — nineteen ingredients, including six varieties of mushroom (shiitake, enoki, lion's mane, oyster, portobello, and king trumpet) and thirteen vegetables, among them minari, the Korean water parsley that gives a particular brightness to the broth. Both are also available as powder stick versions — the Seafood Stock Powder and the Vegan Stock Powder — for those who prefer that format. Either way, the flavor is the same; it's simply a matter of how you like to cook.
The Greens That Travel Well
The last pillar of the Korean table is namul — the category of seasoned vegetable dishes that appear at nearly every Korean meal, often as banchan, the small side dishes that surround the rice. Namul can be made from dozens of different greens, and the traditional preparation involves blanching, squeezing, and seasoning — a process that is brief but requires fresh ingredients that are difficult to find in most markets outside Korea.
Trunas's freeze-dried namul — thistle, mallow, and radish leaves, all 100% Korean — go through five rounds of washing and a brief blanch before drying, so what arrives in the package is already clean and tender. They rehydrate cleanly for namul muchim (seasoned greens), namul bap (rice cooked with greens), or a simple broth.
Taken together, these products don't represent a single Korean dish. They represent the infrastructure of Korean cooking — the things that need to be in the kitchen before anything else can happen.
There's something quietly radical about what Trunas has made. Korean cooking, for all its depth and pleasure, has historically been one of the harder cuisines to replicate abroad — not because the techniques are complicated, but because the ingredients are specific, and specificity matters. A garlic tablet, a broth coin, a handful of freeze-dried silaegi: small objects, each one. But the pantry they add up to is the reason Korean food tastes like Korean food — and Trunas, starting from a single coin pressed in a factory near the Namhan River, is the company that figured out how to put it in a box and ship it anywhere.
FAQ
What is freeze-drying, and how is it different from regular drying?
Freeze-drying removes moisture by flash-freezing ingredients and then converting the ice directly into vapor under vacuum — without using heat. Regular drying uses heat, which degrades flavor compounds, color, and nutrients in the process. Freeze-drying preserves all three, which is why rehydrated freeze-dried ingredients can taste remarkably close to fresh.
Where are Trunas ingredients sourced from?
All ingredients used in Trunas products are sourced from Korea. The garlic, ginger, cheongyang chili, and namul greens are grown domestically; the seafood components in the broth tablets — including anchovy, kelp, and clam — are sourced from Korean waters. The facility itself is based near the Namhan River in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province.
Are Trunas products MSG-free?
Yes. All Trunas products are made with 100% whole ingredients and contain no chemical additives, MSG, or artificial preservatives. The deep umami in the broth tablets comes from the natural glutamates in kelp, dried fish, and mushrooms — the same reason a properly made Korean anchovy broth tastes as rich as it does.
How hot is cheongyang chili pepper?
Cheongyang registers around 4,000–8,000 Scoville heat units — hotter than a jalapeño, but prized less for its intensity than for its clean, bright heat. It's the chili that gives Korean jjigae and stir-fries their characteristic sharp finish, and it's rarely found fresh outside Korea.
Are these products suitable for vegans?
The aromatic tablets (garlic, ginger, cheongyang) and the vegan broth tablet are suitable for vegans. The seafood broth tablet contains dried fish and shellfish and is not vegan. Trunas holds official vegan certification for its vegan-certified products.