Momofuku Ando is the father of Instant Ramen. Feeding Japan after the war. But how do you get Americans to eat it?

Dave Young:

Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is … well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young. Stephen Semple’s right there standing by, and he just told me what we’re going to be talking about and, man, it took me back to college days. In fact, I was looking at photos over the weekend. I have some photos of when I was in college, and this is way back 20 years before the turn of the century, to tell you how long ago this is.

Stephen Semple:

I hate how you put it that way.

Dave Young:

This is 20 years before the turn of the century. That’s a lifetime ago. But there were days in college where it’s like, “Well, gosh, Mom and Dad haven’t sent me any money and I haven’t gotten the job that I told myself I’d get,” so you go to the store, and what do you find? It’s either ramen or, if you want an upgrade, Cup O’ Noodles. And the Cup O’ Noodles, as everyone that’s ever been poor knows, is a noodle soup in a cup, and you take the lid off, put some water in it, throw it in the microwave, voila. Am I right? Is that what we’re talking about, or is this some new form?

Stephen Semple:

No, no, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’re talking about, not some new Tesla called Cup O’ Noodles. No, no, you’re right, but I want you to hold onto that thought of it as being an upgrade from ramen, because we’re going to revisit that.

Dave Young:

Not an upgrade?

Stephen Semple:

We’re going to revisit that whole idea, because that’s brilliant. It was started in the 1950s and it was a new idea then, but today there’s over a hundred billion servings of instant noodles eaten every year. And it’s estimated that Cup O’ Noodles sells between 18 and 25 billion servings a year. It’s inside of a larger organization, so it’s hard to know exactly, but that’s the estimates I’ve come across.

Dave Young:

Dude, that’s like feeding the planet three times in one day.

Stephen Semple:

Right? Isn’t that crazy?

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

So, empire? Yeah.

Dave Young:

Yeah. There’s some guy sitting on top of that noodle money somewhere, and I guess we’re going to hear the story.

Stephen Semple:

So in the 1950s in the United States, food is boring. Eating out was like literally going to diners, and international food really only existed in big cities that had Chinatowns.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

And, following World War II, there was actually a strong anti-Asian feeling in the United States. Meanwhile, back in Osaka, Japan, there’s a food crisis after the war because basically Japan has been decimated, and bread is being distributed by the U.S. and it’s really plentiful, but people wanted more traditional meals.

Dave Young:

They’re not used to bread.

Stephen Semple:

Right. It’s not part of what they normally eat. So Momofuku Ando is a 48-year-old businessperson. He’s lost his company. He went to jail for tax evasion. All sorts of bad things went on, but he’s out of jail and he’s looking to start his new business, and he sees people lined up for ramen, so there is a ramen tie in here.

Dave Young:

There you go, yeah. Just to be fair, I wasn’t talking about ramen from a store or from a vendor. I’m talking about those little bricks of Top Ramen.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, yeah. Hold onto that. Hold onto that thought. We are going to come back to that, yes. So, ramen was created when noodles basically came over from China, and 1910 is the earliest record we could find of a ramen shop in Japan, so it looked like it was around 1910.

Dave Young:

Yep. The Japanese didn’t have noodles till 1910?

Stephen Semple:

They didn’t have the type of noodles in ramen, yes.

Dave Young:

Okay. See, I mean, we could go a whole nother direction on this if you wanted to, in the Japanese industrialization of them going around the world and bringing all kinds of new technology back to Japan in the early 1900s.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

Turns out, including noodle technology.

Stephen Semple:

Including noodle technology, and we forget how closed Japan was.

Dave Young:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Basically, the only thing that was imported was silk. Right? That was about it. Very, very closed economy, and then yes, lots of … And when things changed in Japan, boy, they changed in a hurry. It went from basically medieval to industrial in like, that. It was crazy.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

I mean, you and I are both whiskey fans, and we know that the story of Japanese whiskey is the same story. The Japanese guy goes to Scotland, falls in love with Scotch whiskey, figures out how to make it, comes back to Japan and builds the Japanese whiskey industry.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Let’s go back to noodles. I’m sorry. I will distract us all day long.

Stephen Semple:

No, but it is an interesting thing. Now, the main drawback to ramen is it’s hard to make at home. The noodles need to be fresh. They’re hand-cut. They’ve got to come from shops. And so what Momofuku decides is he wants to make a ramen product that is tasty, non-perishable, easy to make, affordable, and ready in five minutes with hot water.

Dave Young:

Wow.

Stephen Semple:

That’s his goal.

Dave Young:

That’s a goal.

Stephen Semple:

On top of that, he has no culinary training. So he invests every last penny into this, because he needs something he can put into a grocery store as well on the non-perishable, because there’s few refrigerators or ovens in Japan at this time.

Dave Young:

Okay, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

And the key is the broth, and it can take days to make the broth. So here was his question. If everyone loves ramen, why is it so hard to make? And so he tries drying the noodles, then he gets the broth dried into the noodles, and he spends several years working on this and nothing seems to work. And one day, he notices his wife tempura-frying food and the batter dehydrates immediately the moment it hits the oil, because what does oil do? Removes water. So now what he does is he drops the noodle into this high-heat oil, and it creates a shell. He then takes fresh noodles, cooks them in the broth until it’s saturated, drops it into the oil, and the water is cooked out. It works.

Dave Young:

Wow.

Stephen Semple:

It works. He’s now got this dried noodle. Now he needs to get it in the store. So he starts with chicken ramen, and that’s more expensive. It’s about six times the price of regular ramen, but what he finds is people are willing to pay for the convenience. So in 1961, it hits stores in Osaka and it sells like crazy, and it’s called Magic Ramen by customers.

Dave Young:

Magic Ramen. I like that.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, and he gets to the point where he borrows a million yen to open a factory. In the first year they’re doing 13 million packages, and the second year, 50 million packages a year. Now, to put that in perspective, 50 million packages a year, the TV dinners at that time is one half the number of sales of the amount of ramen that they’re selling in Japan, of this instant ramen.

Dave Young:

Wow. Okay.

Stephen Semple:

It’s 1962, and this idea is getting very copied. There’s now 70 companies in the space in Japan in a few short years. And some are also cheaper and the economy in Japan is still recovering, so Momofuku decides he’s going to spend a couple of million bucks and he’s going to bring this product to the United States.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Now, the timing is really bad. In 1968, there’s a hoax letter written to the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Kwok that MSG is unsafe and The New York Times reports on it, and this becomes a placebo effect on all Chinese food.

Dave Young:

What year was this?

Stephen Semple:

’68.

Dave Young:

’68, okay.

Stephen Semple:

The letter was written on a bet by Dr. Howard Steele, who was a pediatric who was having a hard time getting published, and there was this bet that, “Oh, I bet you if you wrote something this way, it would get published,” so he creates this hoax and it gets published.

Dave Young:

And people still believe it?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. He created this fake research facility with a made-up name, and it’s amazing. Sounds kinda familiar for the world we’re in today, and MSG is declared unsafe for years later.

Dave Young:

Well, my wife thinks MSG doesn’t agree with her.

Stephen Semple:

Well, some people, it may not.

Dave Young:

Maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t know.

Stephen Semple:

But again, that could be just a food intolerance, right?

Dave Young:

You don’t know, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. So Momofuku travels to the United States. Here’s one of the things he figures out. He runs into a bit of a challenge with the U.S. market. He realizes he needs to do sampling, because it became successful in Japan because it was a familiar food that became convenient, right? So it was only one step away, a familiar food that became convenient. It was not a familiar food in the United States, so he decided he needed to do sampling, so he goes over to the U.S., sets up sampling in grocery stores. This anti-Asia movement is so strong, people won’t even try it. It’s too new.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Won’t even try it.

Dave Young:

And don’t know what ramen is.

Stephen Semple:

Right. So when he’s done, he’s got all this product left over and he decides, “I’m not going to take this product back to Japan,” so he leaves it for the staff, but what he notices is the staff are eating it, but very differently.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

[Using Stories to Sell Ad]

Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off, and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

So when he’s done, he’s got all this product left over and he decides, “I’m not going to take this product back to Japan,” so he leaves it for the staff, but what he notices is the staff are eating it, but very differently. What he discovers is the staff break up the noodles, and put it in a coffee cup and pour in the hot water, and eat it in the break room. The recipe called for these large noodles to be put in a pot and then you transferred the pot to a bowl.

Dave Young:

Oh. Okay, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

So your Cup O’ Noodles, you know when you’re talking about the bricks of ramen? All it is is a brick of ramen, broken up into little bits.

Dave Young:

Sure. Well, I used to make it. I didn’t like the long noodles, so I would do the same thing just instinctively, because I’m an American from the Midwest.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. What he also observed in all of this was that people called it noodles. Yeah. So they took the ramen, broke it up in little bits, put it in a coffee cup, poured in hot water and called it noodles.

Dave Young:

Noodles. I mean, that’s what Mom made for us when we weren’t feeling so good, right? It was some chicken noodle soup.

Stephen Semple:

Right. So now we have the familiar, remember?

Dave Young:

Yes.

Stephen Semple:

Successful in Japan because it was the familiar made convenient. Now we had the familiar. How do you make it convenient? He goes back to Japan, and he comes up with the idea of a styrofoam cup that you put it in. He added some vegetables, which made it a complete meal. Now, the Asian food scare was still there, but it’s not Asian food any longer, it’s a cup of noodles.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Brilliant.

Stephen Semple:

And he stopped calling it ramen. He called it a cup of noodles. And actually, originally it was called Cup Noodle and in 1973 they added the O’, so now it was Cup O’ Noodles.

Dave Young:

So, I mean, you could start riots in the U.S. There could be millions of idiots, that they’re going to be upset now that they were fooled into eating ramen instead of noodles.

Stephen Semple:

Well, I’m safely here in Canada. This is your problem to deal with.

Dave Young:

Yeah? I think you should put some kind of warning label on this episode.

Stephen Semple:

“Warning, may cause riots.” I like it. We may do that. We may do that.

Dave Young:

Yeah. “We’re just a victim of Big Ramen.”

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s one more unwanted foreign influence in the United States.

Dave Young:

Uh-huh.

Stephen Semple:

Today, the estimate is Cup O’ Noodles is like an $8 billion business, but what I found that was so interesting about this was his innovation all came from observation.

Dave Young:

Yes.

Stephen Semple:

He observed that people in Japan were eating ramen but couldn’t eat it at home for a bunch of reasons, so he wanted to make this community thing for home. He observed his wife with the tempura batter, which made for the breakthrough, had this huge success in Japan. But when he came to the United States, it was the whole thing of noticing the people eating it were doing it differently. They’re breaking it up, putting it in a cup, adding hot water. Now, there’s a business innovation lesson here but there’s a marketing lesson as well, because our greatest asset as marketers is observation of people.

Dave Young:

Exactly.

Stephen Semple:

It’s observing how people think, observing how people feel, observing how they act, observing how they react to things, and great marketing comes from observation. So does great innovation. Great innovation is seeing something on the right and pulling it over to the left. What I loved was this moment where he suddenly realized, “Wait a minute, ramen was successful in Japan because we took the familiar and made it convenient.” And then once people were looking at it like a soup, he was like, “Ooh, we make this more like a soup. We’re now taking the familiar and making it convenient, rather than making it a new food,” and I thought that was an unbelievably amazing observation.

Dave Young:

It is. And I think sometimes we get our heads into the books or the business or dealing with the oh, my God, the million little problems that just pop up in front of us every day, and we don’t step back to see the big picture. We don’t step back to observe.

Stephen Semple:

Well, we lose sight of what’s the customer actually thinking, and really that’s all that matters is what’s the customer thinking, right? What’s in their head? What’s going on in their world? How are they going to react to these things? And the more you understand that, the more you understand the human being on the other side of the … All ideas look great when you’re sitting in a boardroom with four white walls, a dropped ceiling and a spreadsheet. You can make anything work. The real thing is, how about the human being on the other side of that equation? That’s what matters. That’s what matters.

Dave Young:

I don’t want this to sound … Oh, I don’t care. I don’t care how this sounds.

Stephen Semple:

We’re already starting a riot, Dave. Go for it.

Dave Young:

Sometimes I get … I don’t use ChatGPT to write very much, but I will hand it something I’ve written and say, “Dumb it down.”

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

“Make the sentences shorter, make this understandable to a sixth grader,” and it does a pretty decent job of helping me figure that out.

Stephen Semple:

For sure.

Dave Young:

It’s not that I’m assuming that people are stupid, but there are some people. Think about this. This is touching on MAGA territory here, but if you think about how smart the average person is, realize that half of the people are less smart than that. When you have a cup of ramen and a word that nobody’s heard, ramen, nobody knew what ramen was in the United States in the 1960s or ’70s.

Stephen Semple:

No, they didn’t.

Dave Young:

But they all knew what a noodle is.

Stephen Semple:

Noodle was. Yes.

Dave Young:

Grandma’s made us noodles forever. We like noodles. We like them in casseroles. We like them in stroganoff. That’s just beef and noodles, and noodle soup. And so if you change the word ramen, you get over yourself, you get over the fact that, “Well, people need to understand that ramen is not quite the same,” no, no, no, no, no. These are noodles.

Stephen Semple:

Just call it a noodle.

Dave Young:

Just call it a noodle.

Stephen Semple:

And that’s what was brilliant in the name, Cup O’ Noodles.

Dave Young:

Yeah. I think there are business owners and marketers that feel like the answer is to educate people.

Stephen Semple:

It never is.

Dave Young:

Never is. That hardly ever works. You need to associate your product with something they already know and understand.

Stephen Semple:

Attach the unfamiliar to the familiar, and we’ve talked about that a number of times in this podcast. But one of my favorite business books is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and one of the things that they talk about is there’s six things that make a message sticky, and one of them is simple. Simple, I have a different take. I hate the term, dumbing things down. I like instead, let’s simplify it, because when a message is simple, it’s easier for everyone to absorb.

It actually takes less brainpower to figure it out, and let’s face it. I’m in a world today where I’m competing with 5,000 messages a day. If it’s complicated and it takes time, it’s not that a person’s lazy, it’s not that they’re dumb. It’s, look, there’s just too much coming at them. The brain is like, “I don’t have time for that, because I got too much stuff coming at me.” So the more you can simplify it down, connect it, make it concrete, attach the unfamiliar to the familiar, the easier the brain just goes, “I get that. I understand it.” We need to make it easy because we’re competing with so much.

Dave Young:

No, I agree.

Stephen Semple:

As soon as you go down this path of I got to educate the consumer, give me a break, because I’m supposed to be educated on the food I eat, the air I breathe, the water I drink, the education, how I teach my kids, my health, my finances, my car, my air conditioning. Dude, I don’t have enough time to get educated, all that stuff. I have a busy life, and what I want to do is watch the hockey game at night.

Dave Young:

I agree. I agree 100% with you. And I’ll add this. There are still people that are stupid that eat three times a day.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, there are. There are.

Dave Young:

And they eat three times a day and want a Cup O’ Noodles.

Stephen Semple:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dave Young:

The simplification works in both directions, right?

Stephen Semple:

That’s the key.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

That’s the key.

Dave Young:

That’s why it works so well.

Stephen Semple:

Right, because it wins you actually both ends of the spectrum. What it does is wins you everyone.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Everyone. It wins you everyone. That’s the point I want to make.

Dave Young:

If the sixth grader can understand it, so can the PhD.

Stephen Semple:

Correct. Well, and not only that. You’ll attract the attention of the PhD because they too only have so much time.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Simplify, simplify. Cool.

Stephen Semple:

This was fun. So here’s the interesting thing, Dave, is going back to your early statement of, “Oh, I didn’t eat ramen, I ate a Cup O’ Noodles.” Dude, you eat ramen.

Dave Young:

Now you know. You know, I never thought that the ramen had enough carbs in it, so I always crumbled a package of crackers in as well, to make it kind of a paste. Sometimes there’s just not enough carbs in it, so you just add some potato flakes. It thickens right up. Yeah, I was a master at that.

Stephen Semple:

You there were a connoisseur.

Dave Young:

You can use it as grout. Thank you for bringing us the story of Cup O’ Noodles, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

We’re going to start a riot. Thanks, David.

Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire-building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.