What snack are they eating in the Kdrama Love in Contract?

Love in Contract is a 2022 South Korean television series about a contract marriage master, Choi Sang Eun (Park Min-Young), who offers marriage services to those who don’t want a committed, life-long relationship but still want the social benefits that being married provides. Sang-Eun splits her time between a long-term client, Jung Ji Ho (Go Kyung Pyo) and a new client, Kang Hae Jin (Kim Jae Young) as she tries to maintain the balance between professional obligation and romantic affection.

Like many k-dramas, the display of food and drink on the show is very appetizing to those who enjoy eating clean and savory food. What’s more, the character Ji-Ho is highly adept at crafting restaurant-quality meals at home for his contractual wife, Sang-Eun.

However, a simple snack piqued our interest more than anything when it was shown in episode 9 in a scene where Ji-Ho is having a talk with his therapist after hours at an alcohol house.

Ji-Ho’s supervisor arrives and we discover that he and the therapist are siblings. Small world, right? Kdramas are always like that, making the unlikely likely and the impossible possible.

Anyway, they must have had a roaring good time together because soon the table is piled with empty bottles of Soju and orange juice cartons. Ji-Ho’s supervisor had even ordered several packs of banana flavored seaweed snacks and feeds one to his drunken employee.

Ji-Ho’s manager (Park Chul-Min) feeding him a banana seaweed snack

Seaweed connoisseurs must have been surprised by the introduction of a strange, new flavor and probably jumped onto their computers to search for it online. But for those unfamiliar with seaweed snacks, what are they?

What are seaweed snacks?

Seaweed snacks are thin sheets of toasted seaweed that’s seasoned with sesame oil, salt, and flavors like Sea Salt, Sesame, Teriyaki, or Wasabi. The snack is high in nutrition, especially when compared to it’s counterpart, chips. Some of the health benefits of seaweed are:

• High in vitamins and minerals. Seaweed contains things like riboflavin, thiamin, iron, manganese, and copper. It also contains essential amino acids, omega-3 fats, and iodine.
• Supports thyroid function. The iodine and tyrosine helps the thyroid release hormones that control growth, energy production, and repairing damaged cells.
• Contains antioxidants like Vitamin A, C, and E.
• Supports gut health. The sulfated polysaccharides in seaweed support the “good” bacteria in our guts, making it easier to digest food.

Ji-Ho’s therapist, Kim Sung-Mi (Bae Hae-Sun), eating banana seaweed

That said, do people really get wooed by the health benefits of seaweed? Eh, probably not. People eat the these snacks because they’re super tasty. They love the delicate crunch and the way the snacks just melt in your mouth.

Let’s refocus our attention because the banana flavored seaweed mentioned in the show sounds amazing. Where can we get it?

Where can I buy banana flavored seaweed?

The sweetness of banana and the umami of seaweed; two amazing flavors by themselves, but what do they taste like together? Is it an explosion of flavor? A weird delicacy? A new found addiction? Oh, how our mind races.

Ideally, we would just run to the nearest convenience store and pick up a few packs of banana seaweed ourselves. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The banana flavor is not sold in the North American market.

The brand of seaweed shown in Love in Contract is Laverland Crunch. They have Instagram and Facebook accounts. In a Facebook post from 2015, they posted about their seaweed being sold in a grocery store in New York City, but it’s not clear if they still do or what’s happening. Their Facebook page hasn’t been updated in 5 years. Oh, and their website (laverland.net) is offline.

Banana flavored seaweed snacks by Laverland Crunch

The only option, if you’re bold enough, is to order online through a Korean or Malaysian grocery store that ships to the United States. But is it worth it? Probably. There’s a YouTube Short from December 2022 where kids are saying the snacks are “weird, but delicious,” which is exactly how we imagine how they would taste.

For now, we can still enjoy regular seaweed snacks.

Seaweed Snacks

Deliciously crispy Sea Salt roasted seaweed snacks that you're sure to love.

Buy on Amazon

Keep your eyes peeled on Amazon and in your local Korean grocery store too. If banana seaweed is a great tasting product, as we all hope them to be, the snack should become more widely available in the not so distant future.