The desperate relief effort was organised by a group of North Korean defectors who have been allowed to settle in the South.
The bottles contained a kilo of rice, USB drives containing South Korean entertainment, anti-North Korean news and a Christian message.
The were tossed into the sea off an island close to the demilitarised zone between the two countries.
Conditions in the North Korea are harsh, with UN sanctions aimed at at halting dictator Kim Jong-un’s nuclear programme beginning to have an effect and ordinary citizens are struggling to survive in grinding poverty.
More than 30,000 have defected to the South and many of them have cited hunger as being among their main reasons for leaving North Korea.
According to a UN report, about 70 percent of North Korea’s population relies on food assistance to survive, including 1.3 million children under the age of five.
Only Communist Party loyalists are allowed to live in the capital Pyongyang and those in smaller towns and cities or rural areas are forced to eke out a living.
Soldiers have been ordered to steal crops from farmers’ fields to subsidise their meagre diets and the poor health of a recent defector pointed to chronic malnourishment.
Conditions have improved since the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of North Koreans perished after a combination of bad weather, chronic agricultural mismanagement and the end of the Soviet Union’s food subsidies caused widespread famine.
The state’s Public Distribution System of rationing collapsed and has never fully recovered its ability to feed the population.
But according the UN World Food Programme, 18 million of North Korea’s 25 million people are dependent on state rationing, and an equal number of people are estimated to suffer from food poverty with 41 per cent of the population considered to be undernourished.
There are fears the horrors of the famine – a period the country’s leaders refer to as the “Arduous March” – will return as trade sanctions imposed in response to Kim Jong-un’s nuclear missile test program begin to bite and food shortages worsen.
Last year’s harvest was thought to have been particularly poor, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report which showed rainfall between April and June was lower than the same period in 2001, when cereal production reached an unprecedented low.