By the early 2000s, Korean consumers had grown increasingly anxious about the safety of the food on their tables. A succession of widely publicized incidents, ranging from pesticide residues on produce to parasite eggs found in kimchi and recurrent food poisoning outbreaks at school cafeterias, had eroded public confidence in the agricultural supply chain. At the same time, rising incomes and improving standards of living were shifting consumer preferences toward food they could trust, while WTO accession and successive Free Trade Agreements were exposing the domestic market to a wider range of imports requiring stricter sanitation oversight.Korea's response, introduced as a pilot in 2003 and formally codified in 2006, was the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification system. Rather than relying solely on end-point inspection, GAP applies a farm-to-package management framework that controls hazardous elements at every stage of production: soil and water quality, pesticide and fertilizer use, sanitation during harvest, post-harvest handling, and traceability for the final consumer. Two decades later, the system has produced measurable shifts in farmer participation, consumer willingness to pay, and the institutional architecture for agri-food safety, though questions about price differentiation and uneven adoption remain.