TOKYO — Momofuku Ando, a Japanese businessman whose later-in-life invention of instant noodles revolutionized how we eat one of the world's oldest foods, died Friday of heart failure in an Osaka-area hospital. He was 96.
Ando's entrepreneurial genius was to shuck off centuries of tradition and realize that noodles did not necessarily have to be cooked fresh and served only after being steeped in vats of boiling water. After tinkering for a year in his backyard shed, he discovered that noodles could be dried, packaged and rehydrated in a bowl of boiling water in just three minutes -- and served almost anywhere.
His gamble with flour, palm oil and MSG created a new food that appealed to tastes across Asia and in the United States. He began exporting instant ramen to the U.S. in 1970 and a year later created Cup Noodle -- noodles that could be sold and prepared in the same container -- inspired by the way American consumers plopped their noodles into a cup and ate them with a fork.
The focus on convenience, taste and price turned Nissin Foods Co., his small Osaka company, into a $3-billion multinational corporation with 29 subsidiaries in 11 countries.
As recounted in his 2002 autobiography, "How I Invented Magic Noodles," Ando's eureka moment occurred in 1957, when he noticed a long line of customers waiting for service outside a noodle shop. He asked himself if there was not a faster way to serve all those busy-but-famished construction workers and salarymen who were working late shifts and overtime hours to rebuild Japan after the war.
A year later, he introduced what was first called "Chiken Ramen." He tested the product in one local store in Osaka Prefecture and began mass production after Japanese customers proved they were prepared to defy the sneering of Japan's traditional udon and soba noodle makers. They were also, initially at least, willing to pay up to six times more than they would for fresh noodles in return for the convenience of the quick serving.
Within a year, the company was selling 10,000 portions daily, and competitors began crowding a market that now sees each consumer in this country of 126 million eat an average of about 45 portions of instant noodles annually. Worldwide, the industry sold 85 billion packages in 2005.
