From instant ramen to K-drama: meet Ham Yon-ji, the Korean millionaire chaebol who traded a family food empire for TV and YouTube fame

If you enjoy instant Korean food like Jin Ramen, three-minute curry or microwaveable rice porridge, you’ll probably recognise the Korean food manufacturing company Ottogi – the household brand nicknamed “God-ttogi” for the way it gives back to the community and puts out good quality products at affordable prices.

And while the rich chaebol family behind the company might give off the impression of being conservative and low profile, Ham Yon-ji, the 28-year-old daughter of Ottogi chairman Ham Young-joon, is anything but. Read on more to find out about the third-generation scion, musical star and actress.

Instead of carrying on the family business, she turned to the stage

Rather than following the conventional route of going to business school to prepare to one day lead the family company, like her father did, Ham is making a name for herself in a rather different field: musical theatre. She attended the prestigious Daewon Foreign Language High School and New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and eventually made her debut as Scarlett O‘Hara in a French musical version of Gone with the Wind in 2015, beating out 300 other competitors for the role. Since then, she has appeared in musicals like Amadeus and Notre-Dame de Paris as well as the 2016 TV drama Still Loving You .

She might be rich … but she’s also relatable

Although the father and daughter pair might boast wealth that the rest of us can only dream of, watching them wearing matching pyjamas for Christmas and filming mukbang videos with Ottogi’s products is definitely relatable. (Ham serving dishes on Hermès plates, like she did for guests on the TV show Omniscient Interfering View? Maybe a bit less relatable.)

Last year, Ham also signed a contract with entertainment agency Sandbox Network, and she currently has over 400,000 subscribers.

She was blissfully oblivious of her own wealth