At 47, He Lost Almost Everything — So He Invented Instant Ramen

In 1957, Momofuku Ando was 47 years old and facing financial ruin. A credit union he’d been involved with had collapsed, taking nearly everything he’d worked for with it.

All he had left was his home in Ikeda, a city near Osaka, Japan. After years of trying to build successful businesses, he was suddenly facing the prospect of starting over at an age when most people hoped to be financially secure.

But Ando had an idea he’d been thinking about for years. He wanted to create a meal that anyone could prepare quickly, cheaply and with very little effort. His solution would eventually become one of the most popular foods in the world.

An Idea Born From Hunger

In the years following World War II, Japan had struggled with serious food shortages. Ando remembered seeing people standing in long lines in the cold, waiting for a hot bowl of ramen.

He wondered why something as simple as a bowl of noodles was so difficult to get. Ramen was popular, but preparing it took time. Fresh noodles didn’t keep particularly well, and making a proper meal required cooking equipment, ingredients and a kitchen.

Ando imagined something different. What if noodles could be stored for months and prepared in minutes simply by adding hot water?

There were plenty of problems to solve. The noodles needed to taste good, remain safe to eat, last without refrigeration and soften quickly when hot water was added. They also had to be affordable enough for ordinary families.

Ando had no formal training in food science and no team of researchers to help him. So he built a small wooden shed behind his house and turned it into a makeshift laboratory.

A Year of Failed Noodles

Ando spent the next year experimenting almost constantly. According to Nissin, the company he eventually founded, he worked every day without taking a break and often slept just four hours a night. He tried different ingredients, changed the thickness of the noodles and experimented with cooking and drying methods.

Sometimes the noodles lasted but wouldn’t soften properly. Other batches were easy to prepare but didn’t store well enough. He needed to find a way to remove moisture without ruining the noodles.

His breakthrough came when he developed a method of cooking and drying the noodles in hot oil. The process removed moisture while leaving tiny spaces inside the noodles that allowed hot water to soak in quickly later.

After hundreds of experiments, he finally had a product that worked. On August 25, 1958, Ando introduced Chicken Ramen, the world’s first commercially successful instant noodles.

All customers needed was hot water. In roughly two minutes, they could have a bowl of noodles ready to eat.

There was just one problem.

The Noodles Were Too Expensive

Ando had created an entirely new kind of convenience food, but convincing stores to sell it wasn’t easy. Chicken Ramen cost 35 yen per serving when it launched.

At the time, a bundle of ordinary udon noodles cost about six yen. Wholesalers looked at the price difference and wondered who would spend so much more on packaged noodles.

At first, many were reluctant to stock the product. But customers who tried Chicken Ramen discovered how convenient it was.

They didn’t need to prepare ingredients, cook noodles separately or spend much time cleaning up afterward. Demand began growing, and production expanded beyond Ando’s little shed.

Before long, Chicken Ramen was becoming a familiar sight in Japanese households. Ando had created a new food business out of an idea he’d spent years thinking about.

But he wasn’t finished experimenting.

The Cup That Changed Everything

During a visit to the United States, Ando noticed something unusual about how Americans were eating his noodles. Instead of preparing them in bowls and eating with chopsticks, supermarket managers were breaking the noodle blocks into paper cups, adding hot water and eating them with forks. Ando immediately recognized another opportunity.

What if the noodles came in their own container? Customers wouldn’t even need to find a bowl.

Developing the idea took years. The cup had to protect the noodles during shipping, hold hot water safely and allow everything inside to cook evenly. In 1971, Nissin launched Cup Noodles, combining the packaging, cooking container and serving bowl into one product.

Like Chicken Ramen, the new invention initially faced resistance over its price. A cup cost 100 yen, considerably more than ordinary packaged noodles.

Eating noodles while standing was also unfamiliar to many Japanese customers. Nissin responded by installing vending machines that dispensed Cup Noodles and supplied the hot water needed to prepare them.

The machines made it possible to buy a hot meal without visiting a restaurant or even having access to a kitchen. Cup Noodles gradually became popular in offices, train stations and other places where people wanted something quick to eat. From there, the idea spread internationally.

From a Backyard Shed to Outer Space

Ando continued working on new ideas long after instant noodles had become a worldwide success. He watched his invention develop into an enormous industry, with different flavours, packaging and varieties appearing in countries around the world.

Even in his later years, he remained interested in making noodles more convenient. He eventually supported the development of Space Ramen, a special version designed to be eaten by astronauts in space.

Ando died in 2007 at the age of 96. Nearly half a century after introducing Chicken Ramen, he had lived to see his invention become an everyday meal for millions of people around the world.

And in one of his final projects, he’d helped take instant noodles somewhere even he probably hadn’t imagined when he began experimenting in that little wooden shed.

Into space.