A plug-and-play export pathway helps regional brands reach Asia without building overseas operations
Updated
February 26, 2026 4:29 PM
Coupang headquarters in Silicon Valley. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
Two western Pennsylvania companies — Kate’s Real Food and Healthy Origins — are expanding beyond the U.S. through a partnership with Coupang.
Coupang, a U.S.-technology and Fortune 150 company, operates one of the largest e-commerce platforms in South Korea. It allows American sellers to reach customers overseas without setting up their own distribution networks. Businesses ship products to a domestic Coupang logistics facility. From there, the company manages storage, fulfillment and delivery directly to customers abroad.
For Kate’s Real Food and Healthy Origins, this system opens the door to new markets without requiring on-the-ground operations. Kate’s Real Food makes organic energy and protein bars. Healthy Origins is a family-owned supplements business based near Pittsburgh. Both are now selling to customers in South Korea and in Healthy Origins’ case, Taiwan as well.
That structure addresses a practical gap for growing brands: how to access international demand without building international operations. Instead of navigating foreign warehousing and retail partnerships independently, sellers plug into an existing marketplace and logistics system.
“At Coupang, we’re proud to help thousands of American small and medium-sized businesses, agricultural producers and larger brands sell their goods to customers around the world”, said Coupang vice president Bill Anaya. “We’ve built an innovative, AI-driven export engine that enables great American entrepreneurs — like those who created Kate’s Real Food and Healthy Origins — to expand their horizons, find new revenue abroad and keep growing their local teams".
For Kate’s Real Food, the move marks its entry into South Korea for the first time. For Healthy Origins, the results have been measurable. The company reports that sales of its products on the platform have increased more than 50% year over year since partnering with Coupang. It has also expanded into Taiwan.
“Partnering with Coupang has been a significant step forward for our business”, said Bret Eby, CEO of Healthy Origins. “Coupang makes it easier to deliver a great shopping experience and we’ve appreciated the collaboration and support throughout the process. Its scale, efficiency and consumer reach in Korea are unmatched and launching on Coupang allowed us to elevate our presence and connect with customers in a much more impactful and direct way”.
The broader relevance lies in the model itself. Digital marketplaces are building integrated cross-border infrastructure. That shift changes what international expansion requires. Smaller regional brands no longer need to replicate warehousing, logistics and retail partnerships in every new market. Instead, they can plug into an existing system and reach customers abroad.
In this case, two Pennsylvania companies are doing exactly that. Their expansion illustrates how platform-led trade is reshaping the path from local operations to global reach.
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Where smarter storage meets smarter logistics.
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:32 PM
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Kioxia's flagship building at Yokohama Technology Campus. PHOTO: KIOXIA
E-commerce keeps growing and with it, the number of products moving through warehouses every day. Items vary more than ever — different shapes, seasonal packaging, limited editions and constantly updated designs. At the same time, many logistics centers are dealing with labour shortages and rising pressure to automate.
But today’s image-recognition AI isn’t built for this level of change. Most systems rely on deep-learning models that need to be adjusted or retrained whenever new products appear. Every update — whether it’s a new item or a packaging change — adds extra time, energy use and operational cost. And for warehouses handling huge product catalogs, these retraining cycles can slow everything down.
KIOXIA, a company known for its memory and storage technologies, is working on a different approach. In a new collaboration with Tsubakimoto Chain and EAGLYS, the team has developed an AI-based image recognition system that is designed to adapt more easily as product lines grow and shift. The idea is to help logistics sites automatically identify items moving through their workflows without constantly reworking the core AI model.
At the center of the system is KIOXIA’s AiSAQ software paired with its Memory-Centric AI technology. Instead of retraining the model each time new products appear, the system stores new product data — images, labels and feature information — directly in high-capacity storage. This allows warehouses to add new items quickly without altering the original AI model.
Because storing more data can lead to longer search times, the system also indexes the stored product information and transfers the index into SSD storage. This makes it easier for the AI to retrieve relevant features fast, using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation–style method adapted for image recognition.
The collaboration will be showcased at the 2025 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. Visitors will see the system classify items in real time as they move along a conveyor, drawing on stored product features to identify them instantly. The demonstration aims to illustrate how logistics sites can handle continuously changing inventories with greater accuracy and reduced friction.
Overall, as logistics networks become increasingly busy and product lines evolve faster than ever, this memory-driven approach provides a practical way to keep automation adaptable and less fragile.