I Read the Back of America's Best-Selling Instant Ramen. Then I Spent Two Years Rebuilding It.
Note: After reading this you'll know what's actually in a 50-cent ramen packet, why it costs 50 cents, and what it took to build one that doesn't.
I ate this stuff for a decade.
College, then most of my twenties. Two packets at midnight, standing over the sink, opening the foil seasoning packet with my teeth because I could never find scissors. I'm not going to pretend I was eating it ironically or that I've grown out of it. I loved it. Some part of me still does.
What changed is that I turned one over.
I'd bought that same ramen hundreds of times without ever reading the back. Nobody reads the back. It's 50 cents, it's been on the shelf since before I was born, and the front of the package says Chicken Flavor.
I stood there holding up the line and read the whole thing.
I'm going to walk you through what's actually on that label. Not a scary version of it, just the list. Then I'll tell you what it took to make one without it, and why that costs more than 50 cents.
1. Why does a noodle need all this?
Forty-eight ingredients. Not across a product line. In one packet of noodles and flavor powder.
Four different phosphates (sodium phosphate: mono-, hexameta-, tripolyphosphate; monosodium phosphate; sodium hexametaphosphate; sodium tripolyphosphate)
Three different hydrolyzed proteins (corn, wheat, soy)
Five different fats (vegetable, canola, cottonseed, palm, chicken fat)
TBHQ, a synthetic preservative
Disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate
Silicon dioxide, an anti-caking agent
Lactose
Powdered cooked chicken
Bioengineered food ingredients
Most of that isn't food. It's preservatives, fillers, and texture chemistry, all of it there to keep a noodle stable in a warehouse for a year and make it taste like something once you finally cook it.
A few things stopped me.
There's a synthetic preservative in there called TBHQ. Its job is keeping the oil in the noodles from going rancid on the shelf. The FDA sets a legal limit on how much of it a company can put in your food, which tells you enough.
There's lactose. Actual dairy, in a chicken-flavored noodle, along with powdered cooked chicken and chicken fat. Everyone I've shown this to assumed instant ramen was basically noodles and salt.
And there are four separate phosphates, which are texture chemicals. Not one. Four. I've spent two years around food scientists now and I still can't get a straight answer on why a noodle needs four of them.
Almost nothing on that list is there to feed you.
2. And it still isn't food
Fifty years of engineering, smart people with real budgets, and here's what all of it buys you.
About eight grams of protein. Two grams of fiber.
I want to be fair about this. It isn't that the food scientists failed. They hit their target exactly. The target just wasn't you being fed. Everything on that label is optimized for cost per calorie and for surviving a year in a warehouse, and underneath both of those, for making the next bite as good as the last one. None of that is the same as nourishment.
Which is why you can eat two packets at midnight and be hungry again by one.
So how do you make a bowl of food for fifty cents? You don't. That's the whole answer. You make something adjacent to food and let the front of the package handle the rest.
If you'd rather just see what we made instead, it's here.
I should say why I care this much about a noodle, because I'm aware that's a lot of feeling to have about a noodle.
My grandmother is pre-diabetic. Both my parents take medication for high blood pressure. My co-founder Kevin Chanthasiriphan's family deals with obesity. I'm not telling you instant ramen did that. It didn't, and I'd be lying to you if I said otherwise. But when you grow up eating a certain way and then watch what happens to the people you love, you start reading labels.
That's all it was. I started reading labels.
3. So why hadn't anyone fixed it?
Because nothing has forced the category to change since 1958.
That's when instant ramen was invented, and the formula is more or less what it was. It sells enormously well. There's no consumer revolt, no regulation coming, nobody nervous. When you ship billions of units a year the incentive isn't to make it better, it's to find another half-cent to take out.
The healthy versions I tried before we started all made the same mistake anyway. They fixed the nutrition and forgot the part where it has to taste like ramen. Brown rice noodles in vegetable broth isn't a fix for anything. I bought a lot of those.
4. What we built
Two years. Chefs, food scientists, nutritionists. Somewhere north of two hundred recipes before we had one worth selling, and plenty of those two hundred were bad in ways I didn't know food could be bad.
One bowl of immi:
- 28g protein (theirs is about 8)
- 12g fiber (theirs is about 2)
- 17g net carbs
- 350 calories
- No phosphates, no hydrolyzed proteins, no TBHQ. Vitamin E does the preserving. Shiitake mushroom powder carries a lot of the flavor.
Still ramen, though. Rich broth, chewy noodles, the slurp. Six minutes.
5. Why it costs more than fifty cents
People ask this constantly so let me just answer it.
That fifty-cent packet costs fifty cents because of everything in section one. Cottonseed oil is cheap. Hydrolyzed corn protein is cheap. Chicken fat is cheap. Pea protein isn't. Fiber isn't. When you're selling a packet for fifty cents and it has to survive a year on a shelf, the accounting team wins every argument, and a forty-eight item label is what winning looks like.
immi is pricier than the cheap stuff. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
What I'd say is you're not really choosing between us and instant ramen. It's eight at night, you haven't eaten, and the real options are us, or delivery, or a sixteen-dollar bowl from the place down the street. Or nothing, which I've also done.
But does it actually taste good?
Right question. Anyone who's been burned by a healthy version of a food they love should be asking it.
I'm the worst possible person to answer, so here's everyone else.
“I was sure the healthy version would taste worse. It doesn't.”
“First one that actually tastes like the ramen I grew up on.”
“I bought it to be good for me. I reorder because it's good.”
And if you don't like it, you've got 30 days to tell us and we'll refund you. No questions. That seems fair given I'm asking you to believe something you have every reason not to.
I'd rather you try it than take my word for any of this.
Best pricing of the year is running now, and first orders come with free gifts.
Questions I get
Is this actually healthy or just marketing?
Read our label. It's on every product page. That's the real answer and it's the one I'd want.
Why is it more expensive?
Real protein and real fiber cost more than cottonseed oil and hydrolyzed corn protein. There's no way around that.
What if I hate it?
30 day happiness guarantee. Don't like it, we refund you, no questions asked.
That's everything I know about what's in a fifty-cent packet, and everything we did about it.
The rest is just whether you try it.
