Nissin Cup Noodles 1971: ramen that cooks in its own cup — 21.2B servings a year

Momofuku Ando invented the world's first instant noodles, Chicken Ramen, in 1958, but his dream was ramen people could eat anywhere. On a 1966 trip to sell Chicken Ramen to US supermarket buyers he hit a cultural wall: Americans had no bowls or chopsticks, so buyers broke the noodles into paper cups, poured in hot water and ate with forks. He concluded that making instant noodles global meant adapting them to other food cultures.

Back in Japan he developed a noodle stored in a heat-resistant container that could be held in one hand while eating, testing close to forty prototypes before settling on the ideal cup. Keeping the noodles upright in the cup proved hard — they tilted and flipped — so he used 'reverse thinking': noodles were laid upside down, cups placed over them, then turned over. The method worked and the factory went into mass production; Nissin filed patent and utility-model applications in March 1971, announced Cup Noodles in May, and launched it on 18 September 1971.

The benefits were not understood at first and many stores refused to stock it. The breakthrough came when Cup Noodles was sold from vending machines that also dispensed hot water — and a promotional sale on Tokyo's Ginza pedestrian paradise — making it a hit. Two years after succeeding in Japan, Nissin took Cup Noodles to the United States, and in 1972 its Gardena, California plant began producing the first instant ramen manufactured in the US.

The category scaled into a global industry: in 2017 roughly 21.2 billion servings of cup-type instant noodles were sold worldwide, and cup-type noodles held over half the instant-noodle market in Japan, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Germany and Spain. Nissin localizes cup size, flavor and noodle texture by market, and the product line has since evolved into non-fried, lower-sodium and higher-fiber variants.