“From Desperation to Innovation: How Instant Ramen Became a Lifeline in a World on the Edge of Starvation”
Indeed, so influential are cup noodles that they completely changed Japanese dining culture. As the product is difficult to eat with chopsticks while walking, Ando decided to change the way people ate and packaged each cup with a small plastic fork.
Like Chikin Noodles, Cup Noodles proved spectacularly popular in the United States, the country that inspired their creation. Nissin opened its first overseas factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1973, and today Americans consume over 4.5 billion servings of instant ramen every year. Since its debut in 1958, instant ramen has spread to nearly every corner of the globe, with 103 billion servings being consumed annually. The largest single market is China, which consumes over 40 billion servings per year, followed by Indonesia at 12 billion, India at 6 billion, Japan and 5.7 billion, and Vietnam at 5.2 billion. In 2000 poll, Japan voted instant ramen the country’s top invention of the 20th Century, beating out traditional heavyweights like miniaturized electronics and Toyota cars.
The secret to instant ramen’s global appeal lies partly in its extreme adaptability, for it can be made in near-limitless flavours and combined with local ingredients to suit nearly any palate. It can even be adapted to be eaten in outer space. In 2005, Nissin developed a special instant ramen package for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi’s mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Dubbed “Space Ram”, the meal combined a compressed ball of noodles with a special thickened broth that would not break up and float away in microgravity.
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