Man Who Invented Instant Noodles

Osaka, just after the war. The city is cold, the shops are half empty, and on a corner where a black-market stall sells bowls of noodles, the line of people stretches further than the steam can reach. They stand in thin coats, patient and hungry, waiting their turn for something warm. The noodles at stalls like this one were often made from wheat flour donated by the United States, flour meant for bread — a filling food, but not one Japanese families knew or loved. Among the people watching those lines was a businessman in his late thirties named Momofuku Ando, and he could not stop thinking about what he was seeing. A hot meal, he believed, should never require an hour of standing in the cold. Somewhere between that street corner and his own backyard, an idea began to follow him home.

1910–1948 — The man who kept watching hungry people

Ando was born in 1910 in Taiwan, which was then under Japanese rule, and he moved to Osaka in 1933. He was a restless, practical kind of man, always building small businesses, always watching what ordinary people needed. In 1948 he set up the small food company that would one day grow into Nissin Foods. Japan in those years was a country rebuilding itself from ashes, short of everything — money, fuel, and above all food. Ando often returned to one simple belief: a peaceful world begins the day everyone has enough to eat. It sounds like a slogan. For him, after those years of queues, it was more like a promise he had made to himself.

1957–1958 — One man, one shed, one wok

Behind his home in Ikeda, Osaka, Ando built himself a laboratory the size of a garden shed. Inside it stood an old noodle-making machine, a wok, sacks of flour and bottles of oil — and one stubborn man, now 48 years old, working alone day after day. His goal sounded simple but defeated him for months. He wanted a block of noodles that could sit quietly in a cupboard for a long time without spoiling, and then, with nothing added but hot water, come back to life as a real meal. Again and again the experiments failed him: noodles that dried unevenly, noodles that crumbled, noodles that tasted of nothing. Most people would have closed the shed door and gone back to ordinary business. Ando kept a different schedule. He went back in the next morning.

The evening of the tempura

The answer, when it finally came, arrived at his own dinner table’s edge. Ando was watching his wife, Masako, preparing tempura — vegetables and seafood dipped in batter and lowered into hot oil, the way Japanese cooks have done for centuries. As the batter hit the oil, it hissed and steamed fiercely, and he realised he was watching something he had been searching for all year: the oil was not only cooking the food, it was pulling the water out of it in a rush of steam. Frying, in other words, was a way of cooking and drying at the very same moment.

He rushed back to the shed with the idea and worked out what we now call flash frying. First the noodles were steamed and seasoned. Then they took a brief bath in hot oil. The water trapped inside them burst outward as steam, and as it escaped it left the noodle block full of countless tiny holes, like a sponge made of thread. Dried hard, the block could wait for months without going bad. And when hot water was poured over it, the water hurried into all those little holes at once, softening the noodles back into a meal within minutes. The humblest trick in his wife’s kitchen had just become an invention.

25 August 1958 — Chikin Ramen goes on sale

On 25 August 1958, Ando’s company put the world’s first instant noodles on sale: Chikin Ramen. The seasoning was cooked right into the noodle itself, so there was no little flavour packet to open — the block went into a bowl, hot water followed, and dinner was ready. Ando chose chicken as the first flavour because chicken soup felt rich and nourishing, and it sat comfortably with the food rules of almost every faith.

Success, though, did not arrive politely. A pack cost 35 yen, roughly six times the price of fresh noodles at a grocery store, and shoppers treated it as a strange luxury. So Ando did what he had always done: he took the product to the people himself, holding tasting events where crowds could try a bowl and judge with their own tongues. Curiosity turned into queues — the good kind this time, the kind outside his own demonstrations — and soon production could barely keep up, with the Mitsubishi Corporation helping to carry the noodles across Japan.

1966 — The trip that broke the noodles

By the mid-1960s, sales at home had levelled off, and Ando looked across the Pacific. On a trip to the United States in 1966, he watched American buyers do something that stopped him mid-thought: instead of cooking his noodles in a pot and serving them in a bowl, as everyone in Japan did, they broke the dried block into pieces, dropped the pieces into a paper cup, and poured boiling water straight over them. In America, he understood, the bowl itself was missing from the meal. If the noodles were ever going to belong there, they would have to bring their own bowl with them.

18 September 1971 — Cup Noodles

Five years of patient trial and error followed that trip. Nissin’s team learned to set the dried noodles in the middle of a foam cup, with the flavourings resting on top where the water would reach them, and the pull-back lid owed something to a container of macadamia nuts Ando had eaten on a flight across the Pacific. Cup Noodles reached Japanese shops on 18 September 1971, priced at about four times the cost of a simple pack — another small luxury that had to win people over. It also asked them to bend a custom, since eating while walking was considered rude in Japan, so each cup came with a little plastic fork and Nissin held tasting events to teach the new way of eating.

Then the country watched it happen on television. During the Asama-Sansō hostage crisis, news cameras showed police officers in the cold eating Cup Noodles to stay warm, and Japan took notice in a way no advertisement could buy. At a promotional event in Tokyo’s Ginza district that November, more than 20,000 cups were sold in four hours. In November 1973, the cup crossed the ocean and went on sale in the United States as Cup O’Noodles.

2005 — A 95-year-old looks up at the sky

Most inventors, having fed millions, might rest. Ando, at 95, asked his company to aim higher — literally. At his request, Nissin developed Space Ram, a version of his noodles built for life aboard a spacecraft, and in 2005 the Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi carried it aboard the space shuttle Discovery and became the first astronaut to eat it. Nothing about it was simple: the soup was thickened so it would not splatter or drift away in zero gravity, and the noodles were specially made to cook in water heated to only 70 degrees, since boiling water is not available aboard a spacecraft. Noguchi later said the taste of the ramen people eat on the ground had been reproduced amazingly well. The shed in Ikeda had, in the end, reached orbit.

Then and now

Hold the two ends of this story side by side. In 1958 there was one shed, one wok, one 35-yen pack of noodles that most shoppers thought too expensive to try. Today, the World Instant Noodles Association counts more than 124 billion servings of instant noodles eaten across the world in 2025, up from around 123 billion the year before, with China and Hong Kong alone accounting for more than 43 billion. Cup Noodles by itself passed 50 billion cups sold worldwide by 2021 and is now made in some 80 countries and territories, each with flavours of its own. Ando died in 2007, at the age of 96, having lived long enough to see his noodles eaten in space. The two Cup Noodles museums in Japan — one of them in Ikeda, where his shed once stood — now invite children to come and invent something of their own. I think that is the part of his story that stays with me most: the laboratory was never grand, and the tools were a wok and a borrowed idea from a family dinner. What made it powerful was simply that he refused to stop showing up to the shed.

Questions people ask

Why did frying the noodles in oil work so well? The hot oil forced the water inside the cooked noodles out as steam, leaving behind thousands of tiny holes. With the water gone, the block stayed fresh for months, and when hot water was added later it rushed into those holes and softened the noodles again within minutes.

Why did Ando choose chicken for the first flavour? He saw chicken soup as rich and nourishing, and a flavour that would not clash with the dietary rules of most religions, so the noodles could be welcomed almost anywhere.

How old was Momofuku Ando when he invented instant ramen? He was 48 years old, working alone in a small shed behind his house in Ikeda, Osaka, after roughly a year of failed experiments.

What exactly was Space Ram? A special space version of Nissin’s noodles developed at Ando’s request. Its soup was thickened so it would not splatter in zero gravity, and its noodles could cook in 70-degree water. Astronaut Soichi Noguchi ate it aboard the shuttle Discovery in 2005.

Are Chikin Ramen still sold today? Yes. The original 1958 product is still sold in Japan, and the idea it started now accounts for more than 124 billion servings eaten worldwide in a single year, according to the World Instant Noodles Association.