Cup Noodles

January 10th, 2007 by eyal | Filed under People. | Print This Post Print This Post

This was interesting to find out. There’s actually one person who invented ramen noodles, and it was only 49 years ago.

Mr. Noodle - New York Times

It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan. But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company’s signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

And this one is so true.. :-)

The silver seasoning packet does not always tear open evenly, and bits of sodium essence can be trapped in the foil hollows, leaving you always to wonder whether the broth, rich and salty as it is, is as rich and salty as it could have been.

P.S. With a name like Momofuku he’s probably lucky to have lived in Japan ;-)

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One Response to “Cup Noodles”

  1. Richard | 10/01/07

    …and it’s a good thing he named them ‘ramen noodles’ instead of ‘momofuku noodles’

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