It was a bit of marketing genius. In the three decades that it's been in India, the Swiss noodle brand Maggi, now under fire for allegedly not sticking to food standards, has transformed itself into a 100% desi brand. Maggi’s instant noodles were marketed as the Indian mother’s answer to their children’s badi ghazab ki bhook. The origin of instant noodles, though, is very far from the Indian mother’s pallu and goes all the way to imperial Japan of a century ago.
According to Katarzyna Joanna Cwiertka, author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power, and National Identity, by the early 20th century, the Japanese were feeling quite chuffed with themselves, having established the foundations of an Asian empire, which included Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, eastern Siberia, parts of China, and many South Pacific islands. This confidence allowed the fanatically insular Japanese to start to adopt foreign culture, in particular, Chinese food. In 1910, a Tokyo restaurant called Rairaiken started to serve shina soba, Chinese-style noodles in a broth. The dough for the noodles was kneaded with kansui, a sodium-carbonate-infused alkaline mineral water. This was the grandfather of the instant noodle and soon became very popular all over Japan.
Packaged food
This dish was turned into a packaged food by a Japanese business called Momofuku Ando in the 1950s. It was a time of great food shortages for the Japanese after World War II. To help out, destroyer-turned-protector America was sending over cheap consignments of wheat. The sharp businessman in Ando connected the dots and, in a humble shed behind his home, created a cheap, easy-to-consume mass food by rapidly drying noodles through flash-frying. This method is still used to make instant noodles.
Ando made another change. He called these noodles ramen, from ra (pulled, in this case by hand) and men (noodles, as in the English “chow mein”). The earlier name, shina soba, literally meaning Chinese noodles, contained the name shina (from Sanskrit, chīn), a pejorative and racist name for the Chinese. “Ramen” is, globally, the most popular name for instant noodles although the preponderance of the Maggi brand in India means that most people in the country simply use “maggi” as a common noun to refer to instant noodles.
Indian market
Instant noodles broke into the Indian market but not via Ando’s company, Nissin. In 1983, Swiss multinational Nestlé started to sell its own noodles under the brand name Maggi. It soon caught on, and according the World Instant Noodles Association, India is now the fourth-largest instant noodle market in the world.
To the rest of the world, instant noodles were a sad, packaged meal, eaten alone generally by people too busy or too hard up to afford a proper meal. In India, Maggi was marketed as a family snack to fill up the large time gap Indians place between their lunch and dinner or as tiffin, a school snack, for children.
Unlike the rest of the world, where the target demographic was usually single people living alone, in India Maggi was sold mainly to the modern urban homemaker who still cooked for her children but Maggi just made it that much easier (which still wasn’t good enough for some people). Nissin’s standard instructions of “3 minutes cooking” time was zapped into a catchy “2-minute” tagline, taking advantage of the fact that the phrase is an idiom in many Indian languages and means something like “in a jiffy”.
This urban and middle-class focus in Maggi consumption meant that while India might be a large market for instant noodles in absolute sales, it has really only penetrated a sliver of India’s massive population. Indians consumed a little more than four packets of instant noodles per capita in 2014. The corresponding figure for South Korea was 72. Vietnam consumed 56, Indonesia 54 and Japan 43.
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According to Katarzyna Joanna Cwiertka, author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power, and National Identity, by the early 20th century, the Japanese were feeling quite chuffed with themselves, having established the foundations of an Asian empire, which included Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, eastern Siberia, parts of China, and many South Pacific islands. This confidence allowed the fanatically insular Japanese to start to adopt foreign culture, in particular, Chinese food. In 1910, a Tokyo restaurant called Rairaiken started to serve shina soba, Chinese-style noodles in a broth. The dough for the noodles was kneaded with kansui, a sodium-carbonate-infused alkaline mineral water. This was the grandfather of the instant noodle and soon became very popular all over Japan.
Packaged food
This dish was turned into a packaged food by a Japanese business called Momofuku Ando in the 1950s. It was a time of great food shortages for the Japanese after World War II. To help out, destroyer-turned-protector America was sending over cheap consignments of wheat. The sharp businessman in Ando connected the dots and, in a humble shed behind his home, created a cheap, easy-to-consume mass food by rapidly drying noodles through flash-frying. This method is still used to make instant noodles.
Ando made another change. He called these noodles ramen, from ra (pulled, in this case by hand) and men (noodles, as in the English “chow mein”). The earlier name, shina soba, literally meaning Chinese noodles, contained the name shina (from Sanskrit, chīn), a pejorative and racist name for the Chinese. “Ramen” is, globally, the most popular name for instant noodles although the preponderance of the Maggi brand in India means that most people in the country simply use “maggi” as a common noun to refer to instant noodles.
Indian market
Instant noodles broke into the Indian market but not via Ando’s company, Nissin. In 1983, Swiss multinational Nestlé started to sell its own noodles under the brand name Maggi. It soon caught on, and according the World Instant Noodles Association, India is now the fourth-largest instant noodle market in the world.
To the rest of the world, instant noodles were a sad, packaged meal, eaten alone generally by people too busy or too hard up to afford a proper meal. In India, Maggi was marketed as a family snack to fill up the large time gap Indians place between their lunch and dinner or as tiffin, a school snack, for children.
Unlike the rest of the world, where the target demographic was usually single people living alone, in India Maggi was sold mainly to the modern urban homemaker who still cooked for her children but Maggi just made it that much easier (which still wasn’t good enough for some people). Nissin’s standard instructions of “3 minutes cooking” time was zapped into a catchy “2-minute” tagline, taking advantage of the fact that the phrase is an idiom in many Indian languages and means something like “in a jiffy”.
This urban and middle-class focus in Maggi consumption meant that while India might be a large market for instant noodles in absolute sales, it has really only penetrated a sliver of India’s massive population. Indians consumed a little more than four packets of instant noodles per capita in 2014. The corresponding figure for South Korea was 72. Vietnam consumed 56, Indonesia 54 and Japan 43.