Choco pie
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| Type | Snack cake |
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| Place of origin | Korea |
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| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 초코파이 |
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| Revised Romanization | chokopai |
| McCune–Reischauer | ch'ok'op'ai |
| IPA | [tɕʰo.kʰo.pʰa.i] |
A choco pie (초코파이) is a snack cake consisting of two small round layers of cake with marshmallow filling with chocolate covering. The term originated in America but is now also used in other parts of South Korea as either a brand name or a generic term. Names for similar confections in other places include chocolate marshmallow pie,Wagon Wheels, angel pie, and moon pie.
Variations of the original go back to as far as 1917 in the southern United States. In 1929, Chattanooga Bakery created the Moon Pie with marshmallow filling and Graham crackers for local miners in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In 1973, a member of the R&D team of the Korean firm Tongyang Confectionery visited a hotel in Georgia, US, and was inspired by the chocolate-coated sweets available in the hotel's restaurant, He returned to South Korea and began experimenting with a chocolate biscuit cake, creating the choco pie as it is known to Koreans. The name "Choco Pie" became popular when Tongyang first released the Orion Choco Pie, and was well received by Korean children as well as the elderly because of its affordable price and white marshmallow filling. Tongyang Confectionery later renamed the company Orion Confectionery thanks to the success of the Orion Choco Pie brand.
In 1979 Lotte Confectionery began to sell a similar confection. When Lotte Confectionery put the Lotte Choco Pie on the market, it chose to spell the prefix 'Cho' slightly differently in Hangul from how Tongyang was spelling it. Haitai and Crown Confectionery also began selling their own versions of choco pies. In 1999, after many years of sales of different "Choco Pie" products, Tongyang (Orion) filed a lawsuit against Lotte for their use of the term "Choco Pie", claiming the name was their intellectual property. The court ruled, however, that Tongyang was responsible for having allowed its brand name to become, over time, a generic trademark and that the term "choco pie" was to be considered a common noun due to its generic descriptive sense in reference to confections of similar composition.
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Wikipedia