The Tangled Story of Instant Ramen

Summary

Business History Podcast: The Tangled Story of Instant Ramen

Episode Date: August 12, 2026
Hosts: Jacob Goldstein & Robert Smith

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Episode Overview

In this lively episode, Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith explore the fascinating, twisty history of instant ramen and its eccentric “inventor,” Momofuku Ando. The hosts dig into how instant noodles went from a small backyard experiment in postwar Japan to a global staple that feeds billions — and how much of the story we know is as much a business myth as a culinary tale. Along the way, the episode investigates themes of entrepreneurship, national economic policy, inventive marketing, intellectual property battles, and what truly makes a business great: not just invention, but execution (and sometimes a really good story).

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of Instant Ramen (01:49–06:56)

• Momofuku Ando’s Dream:
  Ando aspired to make artisanal ramen—a fresh, local specialty—into something cheap, instant, and mass-market.
  • Goldstein: “He is the Thomas Edison of the instant noodle.” (03:09)
• Trial & Error:
  He spends a year in a shed trying countless recipes, seeking a way to preserve fresh noodles.
• Eureka Moment:
  Inspired by his wife frying tempura, he realizes flash-frying could dehydrate noodles, making them shelf-stable.
  • Goldstein: “He has invented instant ramen, a product that human beings... will eat 123 billion with a B servings of in 2024.” (04:13)

2. The Legend vs. the Reality (04:45–18:16)

• Corporate Mythmaking:
  The official story, as told at Cup Noodle Museums, paints Ando as an archetypal lone genius. But he wasn’t the first to use flash-frying, nor the first to patent instant noodles in Japan.
  • Smith: “They don’t want you to know this at the Cup Noodle Museum...” (05:21)
• History of the Business:
  Ando’s real genius lay in entrepreneurship and storytelling, not invention:
  • “He was the guy who told his story better than anybody else.” (05:24)
• Inventors vs. Entrepreneurs:
  Drawing on Joseph Schumpeter, the hosts clarify: invention is “economically irrelevant” until executed and marketed.
  • Smith (reading Schumpeter): “As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant. And to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from inventing it...” (17:53)
• Persistence and Failure:
  Ando’s early life: orphaned in Taiwan, textile business destroyed by WWII, imprisoned twice (once for “fraud,” once for “tax evasion”), and several failed ventures before noodles.

3. Postwar Japan, Surplus Wheat & Supply Bottlenecks (06:56–14:44)

• Food Shortages & U.S. Influence:
  After WWII, Japan’s food system is in crisis; U.S. wheat imports lead to an awkward PR push to consume white bread, not a traditional Japanese staple.
  • Goldstein: “We should be turning that wheat into ramen.” (12:36)
• Spotting Opportunity:
  Ando notices long lines for ramen (but not for bread) and identifies a huge unmet demand.

4. Execution, Patents & The Ramen Business Model (14:44–27:24)

• First Instant Noodles:
  Chicken Ramen debuts in 1958—no flavor packet; the seasoning is fried in, and an egg can be poached in a divot on top.
• Intellectual Property Battles:
  Ando trademarks “Chicken Ramen” and acquires flash-frying patents from competitors, building industry cartels and licensing structures.
  • “First rule of buying up intellectual property rights: Don’t talk about buying up intellectual property rights.” (25:03)
• Government’s Role & Keiretsu:
  Japanese economic growth is managed, not laissez-faire. Mitsubishi partners with Ando, and distribution rides on the back of large industrial keiretsu (interlinked company groups).
  • “Mitsubishi from Ramen to missiles.” (31:47)

5. Marketing Genius & Global Adaptation (32:13–36:56)

• Ramen as Health Food:
  Packaging declares “build strength” and “a full meal,” reflecting postwar anxieties about Japanese nutrition versus Americans’.
  • Goldstein: “At the time, there was this belief that part of the reason Japan lost the war was that the American diet made Americans stronger...” (32:35)
• Cultural Adaptation:
  • In the U.S., Ando observes buyers breaking ramen blocks into cups and eating with forks—so he invents “Cup Noodles.”
  • Patent innovation: The noodle block is suspended in a cup, with space for expansion and even distribution of hot water and steam.
  • Noodle length is halved in the U.S. product to reduce slurping, which is culturally frowned upon—contrasting with Japan, where it’s good manners.

6. Cup Noodles’ Big Break in Japan (38:07–45:27)

• The Unexpected Catalyst:
  In 1972, a notorious hostage crisis dominates Japanese TV; viewers watch police eating Cup Noodles during the standoff. The product’s visibility skyrockets overnight.
  • Goldstein: “What everybody in Japan saw... was tough, grizzled Japanese police officers fighting cold and hunger and eating Cup Noodles.” (42:50)
• Going Global:
  Ando adapts Cup Noodles for global markets—introducing flavors for Brazilian (churrasco), Hong Kong (crab), Thai (tom yum), Indian (masala), Mexican (birria) palates.
  • Goldstein: “They are incredibly ubiquitous... Worldwide, people eat 120 billion servings of instant ramen per year.” (45:33)

7. Ramen in Space & The Power of Story (46:30–47:57)

• Space Ram:
  Ando invents a noodle for astronauts; in 2005 a Japanese astronaut dines on ramen in orbit.
  • Smith: “Momofuku Ando understood the power of a good story. And that’s just a great story.” (47:12)
• The Legacy:
  Ando dies at 96; his myth (the lone noodle genius) is cemented, celebrated with a space-themed stadium funeral.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Innovation:
  “Ideas are plentiful and execution is rare.” — Robert Smith (17:09)
• On Inventor Narratives:
  “Edison basically did not invent the movies, but... he got credit, at least in America, for inventing the movies.” — Jacob Goldstein (17:21)
• On Perseverance:
  “He just keeps working at it.” — Jacob Goldstein (14:55)
• On Business Strategy:
  “First rule of buying up intellectual property rights: Don’t talk about buying up intellectual property rights.” — Jacob Goldstein (25:03)
• On Marketing Ramen:
  “The original ramen packaging has the phrase build strength and a full meal, boasting the highest nutrition and great taste.” — Jacob Goldstein (32:13)
• On Global Expansion:
  “Deliciousness has no borders, but there’s a cultural barrier to eating habits. This is smart.” — Robert Smith (35:00)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Invention origin story & cup noodle myth: 01:49–06:56
• The reality behind the legend: 04:45–18:16
• Postwar Japan’s food crisis & wheat surplus: 06:56–14:44
• Patent wars, cartel formation, keiretsu explanation: 14:44–27:24
• Marketing and U.S. adaptation (Cup Noodles): 32:13–36:56
• Cup Noodles' accidental TV breakthrough: 41:38–45:27
• Noodles in space & Ando’s final legacy: 46:30–47:57

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Tone and Style

The hosts keep things engaging and humorous, blending business analysis with warm nostalgia and gentle skepticism of corporate mythmaking. They intersperse personal anecdotes (eating ramen raw as kids, Cup Noodles from bodegas), tongue-in-cheek banter, and pop culture references while still delivering clear business history lessons.

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Takeaways

• Success can hinge less on who invents a product than on who executes, markets, and mythologizes it.
• Momofuku Ando’s true genius lay not in invention, but in relentless iteration, shrewd business maneuvering, and storytelling.
• Instant ramen’s rise is also the story of postwar Japan’s economic recovery, industrial policy, and global corporate expansion.
• The origin myth—personal struggle, sudden insight, lone inventor—is a universally powerful business narrative, even when the details are messier.
• Instant ramen’s place in the world (and outer space) is as much about cultural adaptation and marketing as about food science.

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For further recommendations, episode feedback, or to suggest another food business story, listeners are encouraged to email BusinessHistoryUshkin FM or connect with the hosts on social media.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Robert Smith]

PushKit too quick?

[Jacob Goldstein]

No, it was perfect. Pushkit stop. You got it. Momofukuando had a dream. He wanted to turn ramen delicious noodles. Delicious noodles from something that was artisanal, that was made and served fresh in little shops into a cheap, mass produced instant food. This is not a dream of our moment, but it was a very mid 20th century kind of dream. Which was when he was dreaming this dream.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, Age of science. An age of convenience. An age where scientists could help us eat faster and more efficiently.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, yes, industrial food as mid 20th century dream. His dream was also, as I'll talk about in the show, a very post war Japanese economic miracle kind of dream. And so Ando had a friend of his build him a shed out back behind his house in Osaka. He bought a used noodle making machine, brought it home on his bike and set it up in the shed. And every Day for a year. He is out there in the shed from five in the morning until two the next morning, trying to figure out how to make his instant ramen dream come true. He is the Thomas Edison of the instant noodle.

[Robert Smith]

Kind of seems like he read the Thomas Edison biography and is taking it to heart.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, he's a businessman, he is not a chef. But this doesn't stop him. He tries adding eggs, starch, yams, milk powder, spinach juice. Finally, he gets better at making the noodles. But he's still stuck on this last key step. How do you preserve them so that they're not fresh and gonna go bad, but stable? You can just put them in the cabinet and then cook them up in an instant whenever you want them. And one day, Ando sees his wife making tempura in the kitchen in the house. And he notices that the batter is giving off these bubbles of moisture in the pan. And he realizes that by frying the freshly made noodles, he could dehydrate them and preserve them. Eureka.

[Robert Smith]

This is the moment.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So he flash fries his noodles, lets them cool, and then he adds boiling hot water to the noodles, and voila, they rehydrate and cook within minutes. He has invented instant ramen, a product that human beings on planet Earth will eat 123 billion with a B servings of in 2024 in the distant future. This is the story that they tell at the Cup Noodle Museum in Osaka, Japan.

[Robert Smith]

It's a corporate museum.

[Jacob Goldstein]

A corporate museum indeed that has a full scale replica of the shed. They also tell this story at the other Cup Noodle museum in Yokohama, where there is another full scale replica of the shed. Maybe it's a replica of the replica. One doesn't know. But the official story, this story I just told you, leaves out some important details. Perhaps most importantly, Momofukuando was not the first person to figure out that you could preserve ramen by flash frying it. He wasn't even the first person to patent instant ramen in Japan.

[Robert Smith]

They don't want you to know this at the Cup Noodle Museum, telling you

[Jacob Goldstein]

the things they don't want you to know on business history. But look, Ando was the guy who made the instant noodle great, who built top ramen and cup noodle into global convenience food superpowers. And crucially, centrally, he was the guy who told his story better than anybody else. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

[Robert Smith]

I'm Robert Smith. This is Business History, a show about the history of business.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Today on the show, Ramen, the foundational product, a foundational product of our modern age fuels higher education.

[Robert Smith]

Absolutely. PhDs only eat ramen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Only eat ramen. And it has a weirdly warm place in our hearts, given that it is this industrial mid century food.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, the warm place is the salt.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The salt and the hot water. The hot, salty water going down.

[Robert Smith]

A lot of the salt, blood pressure thing going on.

[Jacob Goldstein]

When I was in elementary school and I was home alone in the afternoons, on the weekday afternoons, sometimes I'd eat a pack of ramen raw. You ever do that?

[Robert Smith]

I have done it. It is kind of delicious.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

It's not bad.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The only question is, do you go flavor pack or no? Like no matter how spicy you feel?

[Robert Smith]

No, no flavor pack. My best ramen moment was when I was in South Korea. I was watching a baseball game, and instead of peanuts and Cracker Jack, you go down to the convenience store at the stadium, buy a cup of ramen, add hot water, and then you slurp it at your seat.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It is remarkably ubiquitous. You know, people talk about eating it in Nigeria and in Poland and, you know, rich countries, poor countries, Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas. Ramen has conquered the world, Right? Instant ramen has conquered the world. So how did it happen and why? It happened largely because of this guy, Momo Fukuondo. So let's talk about him. He was born in 1910 in Taiwan. His name at the time was Goh Pek Hok. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. His parents died when he was very young. He'd later say he couldn't remember their faces. And he was raised by his grandparents. He spent his childhood in their textile store doing chores. And when he was 22, he went into the textile business for himself with money he had inherited from his parents.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

And.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And at the time, at the time, Taiwan was a Japanese colony. This is first part of the 20th century. Ando had an uncle near Osaka, and that led him eventually to move to Osaka, move to Japan and set up a textile company there. And then World War II started, which just took his textile business out of business. But one thing that will become clear about Ando, that I think is really the essence of his story in some ways is, is he is a hustler. He is a guy who just keeps coming up with new businesses, and he's gonna come up with a lot before he gets to ramen. So during the war, he's selling charcoal, he's selling some kind of optical equipment for the war effort. But then a manager at the factory is suspected of fraud. And apparently Ando reports the fraud, but he ends up getting arrested. It's unclear really what happened, but it is clear that he got arrested and he's put in a cell and he sees prisoners fighting over tiny servings of food. And he'll later say this is part of his impetus to want to create this kind of cheap, abundant food. He gets out 45 days later, and not long after he gets out, Japan surrenders and the war is over. Around this time, he marries a Japanese woman named Masako. Ando takes her name. Actually, Ando changes his first name to Momofuku. Side note, as some people, some listeners may have been thinking already, isn't there a fancy, basically ramen chain, food chain in America today called Momofuku? Is it a coincidence, Robert, you actually talked to David Chang, right, the guy

[Robert Smith]

who started the show Momofukuku, and he said it was a coincidence that Momofuku meant good peach or lucky peach.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Lucky peach, yeah.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah. And so, yeah, he was not basing it on Momofuku, Ando. Or so he says.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Or so he says. Surely he must have known. Anyway, so we're in post war Japan now. There is a profound food shortage. In fact, the US had been deliberately cutting off Japan's supplies of food imports during the war. And now after the war, the harvest in Japan is bad. It's quite a desperate situation. People are eating peanut shells, they're stealing vegetables from the fields. And Ando is this entrepreneurial guy out of prison, wants, you know, wants to start a business also, I think genuinely wants to do something helpful. So he starts getting into the food business. He finds an abandoned military base on a beach and finds a bunch of demobilized soldiers with nothing to do and opens up a salt plant. And the soldiers are working for him, making salt on the beach. Another company he starts extracts the marrow from discarded and animal bones to make some kind of nutrition supplement. And around this time, a couple things come together to plant the seeds of the big idea, the ramen, the instant ramen idea in his mind. One, the US is occupying Japan and the US is bringing food from the US to help stave off famine. In particular, the US is bringing in surplus wheat. It's a classic American move.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, because we have wheat farmers and it's a great way to take our bounty and move it to another place, even if they don't traditionally eat much wheat.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Right.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And so they had eaten some bread in Japan, and before the Portuguese had brought bread, they didn't eat Much. But the Americans, they're bringing in this flour and turning it into white bread, which is not a normal thing in the Japanese diet. And there are these, like, PR vans going around, which I think means like the vans with the big speaker on top driving around, being like, america is giving you bread, you know, and they're putting it in school lunches and this sort of thing.

[Robert Smith]

If you're hungry, eat some bread. Bread is good. America good.

[Jacob Goldstein]

That's the gist.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So they're trying to get people to eat the bread. Ando knows about this. And there's a moment when this is happening that is like a key moment, according to him, where he's walking by a train station and he sees this long line of people and they look haggard, you know, their clothes are worn and they're kind of downcast, and it's this long line. He's like, what is this line? And he looks at the front of the line and he sees that the people are waiting to get a bowl of ramen noodles, hot broth. It just looks so good and so satisfying. You would wait a long time for it. And Ando thinks, this is ridiculous. Like, we're trying to talk people into eating bread. This food people basically don't want. That is not a Japanese food. We should be turning that wheat into ramen.

[Robert Smith]

This.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This food that people are lining up around the block for, which is a

[Robert Smith]

very smart business thing to notice. There's a huge demand for something that has a low supply. There's this large supply of bread that no one wants. I mean, it's great.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So there is this sort of corporate autobiography of Ando that talks about this moment. And he says he actually goes to a guy from the Ministry of Health with this idea, turn the wheat into ramen. But he says there was a problem.

[Robert Smith]

At the time, however, ramen and Japanese udon were solely the domain of small scale businesses. There was no pipeline connecting US Flour surpluses with the structures necessary to produce and distribute noodles. The lack of adequate manufacturing facilities and amounted to a bottleneck.

[Jacob Goldstein]

A bottleneck. One of the things we often see in the history of business.

[Robert Smith]

And you can make a lot of money if you figure out a way to solve the bottleneck.

[Jacob Goldstein]

We need a printing press. But for ramen noodles, which is what he's gonna do.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I mean, ramen at this time is a craft product. I actually thought of cars before Henry Ford came along. You know, it's made in small batches, it's made fresh. It's the kind of thing we sort of fetishize today. Like, ooh, small batch. That sounds nice, but you're not gonna feed a hungry nation with it. You just can't turn these shiploads of wheat into ramen in this way. So Ando has this idea, and maybe he would have solved this problem right away but for the fact that he got arrested. Again.

[Robert Smith]

Wow. Criminal.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This time it was for tax evasion. For what it's worth, Ando's story is that it was a misunderstanding about a scholarship program he started for his workers. What really happened? I don't know. But again, it's clear that he was arrested and his assets were seized. And this time, he spent two years in prison. This is some time.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, that's a lot of time to think about ramen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And you don't even have instant ramen to eat while you're in prison because it hasn't been invented yet. So he gets out, and now he is ready to make his big ramen breakthrough after he runs a credit union for six years until it fails and goes bankrupt. He tries a lot of things that don't work, is what I'm saying. Now.

[Robert Smith]

You know what I have to say? This makes me love him. Not that he was some lifelong chef who wanted to perfect this culinary thing, but he's a guy who tried a bunch of things. He's just looking for a way through.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He just keeps working at it. Okay, now he's ready.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

For going out in the shed in the backyard, supposedly having the breakthrough. This is the late 50s. By 1958, he figures it out. Robert Smith. Let's go to the official corporate narrative.

[Robert Smith]

Sure. You can read this on a big wall at the cup Noodle Museum. On August 25, 1958, chicken ramen, the world's first instant noodles, was launched since chicken ramen, a food ready to eat in just two minutes after adding hot water was a product inconceivable under the conventional wisdom of the times. It was dubbed magic Ramen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They may have dubbed the noodles magic ramen.

[Robert Smith]

Nobody else called it magic ramen. They called it magic ramen. Yes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The thing that is clear from the historical record, these noodles were not inconceivable under the conventional wisdom of the time. In fact, someone else seems to have conceived them before. Momofuku. Ando, Robert, we've got more history this time. Not from an official corporate history, but from the book the untold history of Ramen, by a historian named George Salt.

[Robert Smith]

A much smaller company had already released an identical product in 1955 called Flavored Chinese Noodles three years before the release of chicken ramen, but the company was forced to halt production after a few months due to weak sales.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Interesting. I turn now to exhibit B, a Harvard Business School case study entitled Momofuku Ando and the Globalization of Noodles, which points out that flash frying noodles to preserve them was a technique that had been used since the early 20th century in Taiwan.

[Robert Smith]

Where he's from.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Where he's from. They called this noodle dish ji si mian, which I'm probably mispronouncing, but I wanted to say it so I can quote directly from the Harvard Business School case study, which says Taiwanese families shipped packages of gcmyeon to their relatives living in Japan when the country experienced post war food shortages. It seems like Momofuku Ando did not invent instant ramen. Even if he did go to the shack, he wasn't the first guy to figure it out.

[Robert Smith]

You know, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. If there's one thing I've learned during this show, it's that, you know, invention is fine. Invention's great. I'm glad there are inventors out there. But ideas are plentiful and execution is rare.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, when we did that story about Edison and the movies, we talked about the similar theme, right? Edison basically did not invent the movies, but. But he got credit, at least in America, for inventing the movies. And when we talked about that, we talked about Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, the guy who came up with the term creative destruction, which they love today in Silicon Valley. And he wrote beautifully about the difference between inventors and entrepreneurs, which is what we're talking about here. So give us that.

[Robert Smith]

As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant. And to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it, and a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds of aptitudes. It is therefore not advisable, and it may be downright misleading to stress the element of inventions as much as many writers do, or podcasts do.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, we do. That's us. We are stressing it too much because the inventor is so fun, right? Like, yes, execution is what matters, but like the. The guy in the shed trying to try to come up with how to do it. That is delightful.

[Robert Smith]

I think we like the lesson that anyone can be struck by lightning. The light bulb goes off, you come up with an idea and change the world. If the real story is now, you have to actually work hard and do all the hard implementation things to change the world. Well, that's not as much fun. That's just a a job. It's drudgery.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And I used to think, I mean, Edison, the guy who more than anybody created the inventor narrative, you know, famously has 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. And I used to think that was like what you need to get to the invention. But no, it's what you need after the invention to get to business success. Like once you have the idea, all of the work is before you. And I used to think that the myth of the inventor was an American thing or a Silicon Valley thing. But this story suggests that no, it is in fact a global human thing. We love an origin story. We love an inventor. And so Ando was apparently not the inventor, creating magic noodles out of 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration and 1% cooking oil. I know that is 101% added, 3%

[Robert Smith]

salt, and you've got the secret recipe.

[Jacob Goldstein]

But he was, he was a great entrepreneur. He was the guy who brought instant ramen to the world, which we will talk about after the break. Did you know that passive fixed income ETFs only capture about 50% of the

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

MOMOFUKU Ando's first instant ramen. It does seem like it was good ramen. It was called chicken ramen because he actually cooked in some way cooked the noodles in chicken broth before he flash fried them.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Ooh.

[Robert Smith]

The flavor was baked right in.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Flavor was fried right in. And so there was no flavor packet initially. You just add the hot water and it gets chickeny. And there was in the block of noodles. It was a block of noodles like now in a top ramen pack. But it had a little divot on top. And the idea was you crack an egg into that divot and then you pour the hot water over the whole thing and the egg kind of poaches while the noodle cooks. I like that.

[Robert Smith]

That sounds delicious.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Bring that one back. Yeah. He calls his ramen company Nissin Foods. The official story is that the new name symbolizes his desire to create a rich flavor purely each day. Cause nichi means day and shin means pure. Now, we could talk about Ando making instant ramen in his house with his family. Hundreds of packs a day. We could talk about him putting on a suit and doing a demo at a fancy department store in Tokyo, calling out to passersby. Those things really happened. But you know what I want to talk about? I want to talk about Momofuku's real Edison move suing all his rivals.

[Robert Smith]

Oh, so good.

[Jacob Goldstein]

First, he tries to trademark the chicken ramen name in late 1959 and finds there are already 13 other companies making a similar product under that name. Goes to court, wins exclusive rights to the name. Next problem, somebody else has already patented his flash frying method. Another guy, who was born in Taiwan, actually, and had been running a noodle shop in Japan for years by that point. And so Ando negotiates with the guy, winds up buying the patent. And according to that HBS case study, the contract apparently included a provision not to talk publicly about any relationship to Momofuku's chicken ramen.

[Robert Smith]

He's already building up the myth.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He's already building up the myth. First rule of buying up intellectual property rights. Don't talk about buying up intellectual property rights. But I guess somehow the word leaked anyways because a newspaper asked Ando about this deal. Here's what he said.

[Robert Smith]

I am not thinking about monopolizing the instant ramen business. I want to authorize the use of the patent by companies with excellent facilities and technology. If it can be used to prevent surplus production and sharp price drops, I believe that the industry can be stabilized. He's saying, I want to share the miracle that is instant ramen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This sounds like J.P. morgan to me, creating his, you know, monopolies in 1900. Why do we have all these steel companies competing with each other and making a chaotic market? Wouldn't it be much better if one steel company sold all the steel in an orderly fashion?

[Robert Smith]

I'm not in it for the money. I'm in it to prevent surplus production of ramen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So Ando starts threatening rivals with patent violation lawsuits, reaches agreements with 20 companies to share patent rights in exchange for a portion of their revenues. They're all kind of banding together. Some of the other ramen companies, they're a lot by this point, hold out and form their own cartels. And in the end, the government gets involved and brokers a deal.

[Robert Smith]

Are they fighting in the streets?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Like, do they go hitting each other over the head with dried noodles?

[Robert Smith]

They go to the factory and break all the noodles into little pieces.

[Jacob Goldstein]

That's a good one. So in the end, the government gets involved, brokers a deal, and there wind up being three ramen cartels. Ando is, you know, kind of at the center of one of them. This is important. There is a bigger idea here. This is a Japanese economic miracle idea, right? These decades, the decades after the Second World War, Japan has this period of incredible growth, and the government is quite involved. It is not free market growth. Like we might idealize it in the United States. The Japanese government is doing in a lot of industries what it is doing in ramen. It's managing the economy so that there is some competition.

[Robert Smith]

You want competition because you want innovation. You want people to feel motivated every day.

[Jacob Goldstein]

But there is a limit to that competition.

[Robert Smith]

Not too much. You don't want it to drive people out of business. No profit whatsoever.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, that is the government's point of view. Whether that is optimal or not, we can debate.

[Robert Smith]

It worked for a lot of East Asian countries around this time.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It did indeed. This all comes together in a really interesting way in 1959. So, you know, right at the beginning for Ando's business when he realizes he needs a distribution partner to scale and

[Robert Smith]

he partners with Mitsubishi, giant, industrial conglomerate giant.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And had been around in Japan for a while at this point.

[Robert Smith]

I mean, cars obviously, but what else? Finance, probably all sorts of manufacturing steel.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I mean, we'll talk more about Mitsubishi in particular, but let me just talk about where it fits in the Japanese economy, because it's exactly how the Japanese economy works. And so before World War II, Mitsubishi was this giant family owned conglomerate, did basically everything. And there were a few of these in Japan. Mitsui was another one. And then after the war, the Americans came in and essentially took over running Japan. And they were like, what is this? This is not how we run an economy. And they broke up these family owned conglomerates like Mitsubishi. But then after the Americans left, these firms started to reassemble, but in a different way. Rather than a single family controlling everything, what you had was this association of different companies that had similar names. Like maybe they all had Mitsubishi in the name and they all owned stock in each other and coordinated with each other. This was called a keiretsu. Keiretsu. And so Mitsubishi was a keiretsu, which meant it was a bunch of different companies that made steel and chemicals and cars and trucks and ships and planes and that sold life insurance and that was in the shipping business and did import, export. And at the center of it all was a bank, a bank that financed all these other businesses, which was key because bank capital was the key driver of the economy at that point. There was not some robust venture capital system like we have today. There was not a giant stock market where you could just go get money from the market for a new company. And I will note that today the biggest bank slash financial services firm in Japan is Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

[Robert Smith]

Similar to what Warren Buffett did, which is if you have a lot of different businesses having the ability to allocate capital between the different companies. Who's doing well, who needs it, you know, who's generating cash, who wants more cash? If you can do that correctly, you can build all those businesses and grow faster than your competitors.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Is it right, Robert, that the insurance company that is at the center of Berkshire Hathaway is the kind of capital, you know, using the float, like I've heard that. Is that true?

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, a lot of the excess cash is coming from the insurance companies and

[Jacob Goldstein]

financing these other businesses. Yeah. And this works for the Japanese economy. And it's an interesting kind of capitalism. Right. It's not just one company. It's a few big companies guided by the government. The government is quite involved in sort of what they're financing. And, you know, the bank of Japan is standing behind these banks at the center of the keiretsus. And you get decades of extraordinary economic growth out of this system, which sort

[Robert Smith]

of makes sense if you're talking about cars or trucks or building transformers. Seems a little weird that instant ramen would fit into this giant industrial system.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Ando had a pitch about that. You know, he's this little Ramen guy going to this giant global behemoth, and his pitch is much bigger than just noodles. He's thinking big.

[Robert Smith]

He's.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

He.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He says, look, we're getting all this surplus wheat from the US A great deal on our key input for our wheat noodles. The key thing for the Mitsubishi executive is, yeah, this is import. This is, you know, we can get in on these wheat imports and maybe build our trade relationship with the US because, of course, we want to be exporting all these things we're making to the US and so maybe ramen will be like a wedge that helps us build our trade relationship with the United States, which could be huge for us. And so Mitsubishi becomes a distributor for chicken ramen. And pretty soon, Mitsubishi starts using the motto Mitsubishi from Ramen to missiles. It really was another time. If you make missiles today, you don't say missiles in your ad.

[Robert Smith]

From killing you fast to killing you slow. Mitsubishi.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Now Ando's got his product. He's got his intellectual property, he's got his distribution. He just needs one more thing, marketing. And if we know one thing about Momofuku Ando, it is that the man knows how to market his first move. And I love this, he pushes instant ramen as health food.

[Robert Smith]

Why not?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Why not? The original ramen packaging has the phrase build strength and a full meal, boasting the highest nutrition and great Taste. And at the time, there was this belief that part of the reason Japan lost the war was that the American diet made Americans stronger than the Japanese diet made Japanese people rice.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Bad.

[Robert Smith]

Wheat good.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I mean, in its reduced form, yes. In 1960, Nissin adds B vitamins to its ramen and is allowed to market chicken ramen as a government certified special health food. Okay, okay. They got a mascot. It's a little boy named Chibiko. Forgive me, Chibiko, if I'm saying your name wrong. He's got blonde hair, freckles, and a baseball cap.

[Robert Smith]

He's a little American boy.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He is a little American boy. Going back to this idea that the, you know, in post war Japan, the ideal of kind of health and strength was American. They sponsor a TV show. There's a chicken ramen song that was a hit that, alas, I couldn't find online.

[Robert Smith]

You know, I'll sing it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

If anybody listening knows the chicken ramen song, email us a voice memo of you singing it. We will put it on BusinessHistoryushkin FM. Please. All this marketing works. Japan loves instant ramen. Nissin is doing great in Japan, but Momofuku always wants more. He wants to grow. He has an entrepreneur's heart. He doesn't just want to succeed, he wants more. That is the fundamental desire. So in 1966, he flies to California to figure out how to sell ramen to the United States of America.

[Robert Smith]

I picture a madman esque scene of Momofuku Ando in his suit with a stack of ramen by the pool. Everyone like go go dancers in the sun.

[Jacob Goldstein]

You know where he goes. I respect him for this. He doesn't go to the pool. He's not there to, you know, dine out on the expense account. He goes to a supermarket, a supermarket in la, in Los Angeles, and gives a few of the buyers at the store samples of chicken ramen to try. And he watches as they get paper coffee cups, break the noodles in half to fit in the cups, pour hot water on, and then eat ramen with forks while they're standing up.

[Robert Smith]

Americans, Americans.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And you could imagine him being scandalized by this. You don't break the noodles. You don't eat them standing up. You don't eat them with a fork.

[Robert Smith]

There's a ceremony to this.

[Jacob Goldstein]

But Momofuku is not scandalized. He doesn't care what the norms are in Japan. He wants to sell noodles to Americans. He's an entrepreneur, not a chef. He wants to make the noodles in whatever way people will Buy them. Here's what he writes about it later.

[Robert Smith]

It seems obvious, but I was reminded that Americans do not eat with chopsticks and ramen bowls. I believe that deliciousness has no borders, but there's a cultural barrier to eating habits. This is smart.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah. We don't have a tradition of what do you do with a block of noodles you put in a paper cup.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So he's sitting there watching those guys eating their noodles out of a cup.

[Robert Smith]

Noodles.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Cup.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Cup Noodles. Cup Noodles. Robert Smith. Where is this going?

[Robert Smith]

He invents cup noodles. He puts the noodles in the cup. Sell the cup too. You could charge an extra dollar thirty cents.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Thirty cents is closer to it.

[Robert Smith]

Yes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He invents cup noodles, which in various times and places is also called cup noodle and Cup O noodles.

[Robert Smith]

In Ireland it was called Cup o Noodles. In my brain. I know, I'm just joking.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I will say cup noodles is not entirely trivial to figure out. And this one, as far as I know, Ando did figure out. I direct your attention now to US patent 399-7676 a instant cooking cupped noodles and a method of producing same.

[Robert Smith]

Oh, okay, let me read this. The denser top portion of the lump prevents the lower portion from losing heat and remaining unswelled. Thus, uniformly heated and swelled noodles are achieved. The flat, dense top of the lump can advantageously have placed thereon dried meats, vegetables, et cetera, which will not fall into the lump and will therefore present colorful and tasty appearance. This is complicated. So what we did is we actually took a cup noodles and we cut away the side.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes.

[Robert Smith]

Tell me what's innovative about this that we see.

[Jacob Goldstein]

By the way, if you're listening, you can see this happening on YouTube. So. Yes. So there is something, Robert, that you didn't describe that is part of the innovation here that is elsewhere in the patent. And that is if you cut. If you make a cross section of a cup of cup noodles, as you have done here, you actually see that the block of noodles is suspended in the middle of the cup. There's space at the top and at the bottom.

[Robert Smith]

I did not know there was space at the bottom until I cut this away.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They are not trying to rip you off. This is not non functional slack fill, as it's called in the trade. This is functional slack fill because what it means is two things. One, it gives space for the noodles to expand in both direction, but the space underneath means the water goes through and then the steam comes up and cooks the noodles. That is part of the genius and it's really quite something to look at. It really does look like a beautiful industrial food when you cut it open from the side.

[Robert Smith]

Genius. And this, and this was. This was an actual invention of Momofuku or his team?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, his name is on the patent and I think it was him. Robert, put the cup noodles down. We're going to go on with this show.

[Robert Smith]

How do they get the noodles to the precise size to put in the cup? That's incredible.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I think that's in the patent, actually. A plug, I think they might call it a plug, noodle plug. Ando actually rolls out cup noodles first in Japan in September of 1971. And it does okay, but it's not a thing that people in Japan have been clamoring for. You know, he was inspired to invent it for, for American eaters. But a few months later, In February of 1972, Cup Noodles has its big moment in Japan, and it is not the big moment that I would have expected. We'll talk about that in just a minute.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

We're back from the break. It's 1972. Cup Noodles is about to have its big moment. And here's what happens. Members of a radical leftist student group in Japan called the United Red army have an internal purge. We promise it's about Rahman. It's about Cup Noah.

[Robert Smith]

Okay, so leftist student group, radicals, they have an internal purge.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They kill 14 of their own group's members along with an innocent bystander. The cops are after them. The chase is on. They flee to a vacation lodge in a resort town. At some point they kill two police officers and. And they hole up in this lodge and they take the lodge manager's wife hostage. And now there is a 10 day long hostage standoff. You may be asking yourself, what was the deal with this radical leftist student group? I don't know. I don't know anything about radical politics in Japan in the 1970s. But if you are asking yourself what does this have to do with Cup Noodles, then you are in luck because

[Robert Smith]

we're business history, not radical student movement history.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The hostage standoff was broadcast live on tv. Basically everybody in Japan is watching this all the time. And Ando's company had been trying to get people in various jobs to eat cup noodles, trying to show them it's a very convenient food if you're busy, if you're on the go. And what everybody in Japan saw as they were glued to their TVs during the hostage standoff was tough, grizzled Japanese police officers fighting cold and hunger and eating cup Noodles. Eventually the heroic police officers, fueled by courage and cup noodles, storm the lodge in a morning raid and capture the killers. And now Cup Noodles is a phenomenon in Japan. It's in vending machines in Tokyo office buildings. Second best selling vending machine item after Coca Cola. And it's time for cup noodles to go to America. Ando had been selling in America by this point. He had started Nissin Foods USA in 1970, which was a joint venture with another food company and his old pals at Mitsubishi, good friends to have shout out keiretsu. And as a baby step, they had started selling packaged ramen under the brand name top ramen. It's like the top ramen you get today. It didn't do great. The cup was the big breakthrough in America for the US they call it Cup O Noodles. They add pork and beef flavors and they make the noodles much shorter than the noodles in the Japanese version. Half the length of. Remember, he'd seen them breaking it. The Harvard Business School case study actually explains why the noodles are shorter in the American version. In language that just delights me. So I want you to read it

[Robert Smith]

so the consumers would not have to make a slurping sound while eating the product. Whereas slurping was regarded as part of good eating manners in Japan, the noise was highly objectionable to many people. In the United States, Americans loved their

[Jacob Goldstein]

broken in half noodle cup O Noodles.

[Robert Smith]

Just a little slurp, not a big slurp.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Now got Japan, America, Ando and Nissin are off. They're going to take over the world with instant noodles. And you see this decade after decade, they go from country to country, opening factories, adapting the cup to suit individual tastes. There's churrasco in Brazil, crab in Hong Kong, Tom yum in Thailand, masala in India, birria in Mexico. You can actually get that in the US Now.

[Robert Smith]

That sounds delicious. And this is genius. This is a great thing about cup noodles. You can put any flavor you want in there.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They are incredibly ubiquitous. Nissin sells something like 2 billion cups of cup noodle a year. Worldwide, people eat 120 billion servings of instant ramen per year. That's all companies and of course the researchers in Antarctica will eat it there. Basically, on every continent, people eat instant ramen. Like, it is extraordinary how wide it has spread. And you know, it's also literally across the street from my house. Like this morning I'd been meaning to pick up cup noodles as props for the show. I'd forgot. And this morning I went to the bodega that is across the street from my house and of course they had it. And it is not a big bodega. It's smaller than the median 7:11 in America. And it's not particularly cheap, Right? Bodegas. You pay a little more for the convenience. Two cup noodles were available in abundance across the street from my house. Two of them cost me $3.

[Robert Smith]

In New York City, you could never be more than 50 yards from a cup noodle.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Truly, and I suspect in much of the world, Momofuku Ando's last big move was space ram ramen, specially designed to be eaten in space. He and his team designed the noodles to be held together with egg whites to cook at a lower temperature because there's not that much pressure on a spaceship, so water's going to boil at a lower temperature. And in 2005, a Japanese astronaut ate space ram in space, and it made news around the world.

[Robert Smith]

Momofuku Ando understood the power of a good story. And that's just a great story.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So good.

[Robert Smith]

I know, what do they sell one of those in space Rom? But it doesn't matter. We don't care if this is, I don't know, a true story that he was in the shack and all this stuff. What we care about is that there is a miracle in the world, and we just want a little story that makes us feel better, you know, that makes us feel warm and toasty inside, much much as the hot water does to the noodles in the cup.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Two years after the astronaut ate space Rom in space, Momofuku Ando died at age 96.

[Robert Smith]

He had no more worlds to conquer.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He said the secret to long life was golf twice a week and chicken ramen every day.

[Robert Smith]

Don't do it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

His funeral was space themed. It was held at a stadium in Osaka. Two former prime ministers attended, and it was a celebration of the life of the man who, as everyone knows we've heard the story, invented instant ramen. What food should we do a story about? Tell us. You can email us at BusinessHistoryUshkin FM. You can find me on Twitter, aka X or on LinkedIn. Robert, you are adiosmith.

[Robert Smith]

Keeping the radio alive one day at a time.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Our show today was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was engineered by Sarah Bruguer. Our video editor is Matt Nielsen. If you want to see a cross section of a cup of noodles, you can see it on our YouTube page. Our showrunner and our editor and a man who calls cup noodles Pot noodles, I think, is Ryan Dilley. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

[Robert Smith]

I'm Robert Smith. Thanks for listening.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

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