Instant Noodles Began in an Osaka Shed. Last Year the World Ate 124 Billion

In the spring of 1957 a 47-year-old man in the Osaka suburb of Ikeda was kneading flour and water in a wooden shed about ten square metres in size that he had put up in his back garden. His name was Momofuku Ando. He had just lost nearly everything he owned, and he had decided that the thing to do about it was to invent a noodle that could be stored for months and cooked in a bowl with nothing but hot water. He would later say he slept four hours a night for a year and did not take a day off. The shed is now reproduced, down to the tools on the bench, in a museum built on the same street.

A man with a long list of failed businesses

Ando was born in 1910 in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, and raised by grandparents who ran a textile shop after both his parents died. He moved to Osaka in 1933 and spent the next twenty-five years starting things: a knitwear business, a company that made engine parts, a salt works on the coast after the war, a school, a credit association. Some made money. He was arrested in the 1940s on a tax matter and spent time in prison, which he always described as a misunderstanding. The credit association was the one that finished him. He was its chairman, it failed in 1957, and he was left with his house and not much else.

The ramen idea, by his own account, went back to the winter after the war, when he had walked past a black-market stall near Umeda station and seen people queuing for a bowl of hot noodles in the cold, twenty or thirty deep. The country was short of rice and the American occupation was pushing wheat flour and bread. Ando's thought was that Japanese people would rather eat the wheat as noodles, if someone could make noodles that kept. He said as much to a health ministry official at the time, who told him to go and do it himself. It took him ten years to get round to it.

The tempura solution

The problem in the shed was drying. Fresh noodles spoil in a day or two. Dried noodles keep, but they take as long to cook as fresh ones and they taste of cardboard. Ando wanted noodles that were already cooked and already seasoned, and that would come back to life in two or three minutes of hot water. He tried steaming them and drying them in the sun, and salting them, and a good deal else that did not work.

The answer came, in the version he told for the rest of his life, from watching his wife Masako fry tempura. Batter dropped into hot oil loses its water in seconds and comes out full of tiny holes. Noodles treated the same way, steamed, seasoned with a chicken broth, and then flash-fried, lost their moisture, kept for months, and had a porous texture that drank up hot water in minutes. He called the result Chikin Ramen, and it went on sale on 25 August 1958 at 35 yen a packet, at a time when a bowl of fresh udon from a shop cost about six yen. Retailers thought the price was absurd. He got round them by giving away bowls of it at department stores and markets, and by the end of the year the company he renamed Nissin Food Products could not make it fast enough. The press called it "magic ramen".

Ando patented the process and then, within a few years, did something unusual for an inventor: he licensed it broadly to other Japanese makers rather than fighting them in court, on the reasoning that a crowded market would grow faster than a protected one. It did. By the mid-1960s instant noodles were a staple in Japan and he was already thinking about selling them to people who did not own chopsticks.

The paper cup in Los Angeles

In 1966 Ando went to the United States to look for buyers. In a supermarket office in Los Angeles he handed a packet of Chikin Ramen to a group of buyers, who had no bowls. They broke the block in half, dropped the pieces into a paper coffee cup, poured hot water on it from a kettle and ate it with a fork. Ando went home and spent the next five years turning that scene into a product: a cup made of expanded polystyrene, a noodle block that sat wedged halfway up the cup so it would not break in transit and so the hot water could circulate under it, dried shrimp and egg and vegetables on top. He said the idea of loading the cup upside down, dropping the cup onto the noodle rather than the noodle into the cup, came to him in a dream. Cup Noodle went on sale on 18 September 1971 at 100 yen, roughly four times the price of a packet.

Again the trade thought it was too expensive, and again Ando went round them, this time by selling it from stands on the Ginza when Tokyo closed the street to cars on Sundays. The real breakthrough was unplanned. In February 1972 police surrounded a mountain lodge at Asama-Sansō, near Karuizawa, where members of the United Red Army were holding a hostage. The siege lasted ten days in deep snow and was broadcast live, for hours at a time, to the largest television audience Japan had ever recorded. Between the gunfire, the cameras kept catching riot police eating Cup Noodle out of the pot, steam rising, because it was the only hot food that could be got to them. Orders came in before the siege was over.

What the shed turned into

Ando ran Nissin into his nineties and ate Chikin Ramen almost every day, which he credited for his health and nobody else did. In 2005 the company produced a vacuum-packed version, Space Ram, for the Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat on the shuttle Discovery. Ando died in January 2007, aged 96. His company motto translates roughly as "peace follows from a full stomach", and he seems to have meant it: he founded the World Instant Noodles Association in 1997 partly to coordinate shipments to disaster zones, which it still does.

That association keeps the count. In August it reported that the world ate 124.21 billion servings of instant noodles in 2025, up slightly on the year before. China and Hong Kong together accounted for 43.27 billion, Indonesia for 14.54 billion and India for 9.60 billion; Japan, where it started, is some way down the list. That is roughly fifteen servings for every person alive. My own view, having eaten a fair number of them on late shifts, is that Ando's real invention was not the noodle but the three minutes: the first meal in history that fitted inside the time it takes a kettle to boil and a person to decide they are too tired to cook.