Cup Noodles is making Buddy the Elf’s dream come true with breakfast ramen
If you’re looking for a convenient, on-the-go breakfast, put down those overnight oats and try Cup Noodles’ new ramen — it has the artificial flavors of pancake, sausage and egg.
The first time I heard of the new Cup Noodles product, I wondered if it was a spinoff from Buddy the Elf’s plate of noodles. In a scene from the movie “Elf,” Buddy has a plate of pasta piled high with candy, marshmallows and of course, maple syrup.
The Cup Noodles has the same energy.
The packaging looks just like any other Cup Noodles flavor, except inside instead of chicken or vegetable or beef flavoring, it reportedly captures the taste of some popular breakfast foods in both the broth and the noodles. According to Food & Wine, if the noodles alone aren’t flavorful enough for you, you can add a dash of maple syrup on top.
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I must confess I’m a skeptic when it comes to breakfast-flavored ramen, but I’ve seen people eat Cup Noodles in the morning when they forgot to eat breakfast at home, so there’s probably a target demographic for this product.
A couple reviewers at The Takeout tried this breakfast ramen and said it was “entertainingly tasty.” Dennis Lee said, “Regardless, I begrudgingly admit I’m glad that some troublemaker over at Nissin’s R&D lab thought this was a funny idea, because it’s a stunt the manufacturer actually managed to pull off. I’m flabbergasted.”
Apparently, the ramen does taste like pancakes.
If you want to try it for yourself, it’s available at Walmart for a limited time, according to Mashed. Like the traditional Cup Noodles, all you have to do is put the package in the microwave for a couple of minutes and then your ramen is instantly made.
Noodles for breakfast by itself doesn’t really phase me. Plenty of cultures start off their day with some type of soup that includes noodles or a noodle dish and so the concept of eating noodles to me is familiar. But what isn’t familiar to me is flavoring the noodles with pancakes, eggs and sausage.
This isn’t the first time the company behind Cup Noodles has tried more creative flavors. Nissin Foods, the company behind Cup Noodles and Top Ramen, has experimented with pumpkin spice ramen in the past, too.
“The wacky mix of ingredients is on brand for Cup Noodle, which often fuses traditional noodles with local flavors that it thinks will be appealing to consumers,” Neal Saunders, an analyst at GlobalData Retail, said, per KSL. He said American customers “will be more interested in sweet flavors they associate with traditional breakfasts.”
My main question is, what ingredients did the company use in order to artificially flavor the ramen like the aforementioned breakfast foods? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the nutrition information on Nissin’s website to confirm the ingredients that could replicate this concoction of breakfast foods.
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If breakfast-flavored ramen isn’t your speed, but you like the idea of eating ramen for breakfast, the company has a recipe for breakfast ramen that uses the chicken flavored noodles. It does involve bacon and egg, but egg is a pretty standard ingredient when it comes to ramen.
Even though breakfast Cup Noodles might cross the fine line between genius and insanity that the company mentioned when it debuted its pumpkin spice ramen, CNN points out the timing for this ramen is apropos.
The price of breakfast foods, especially eggs, has skyrocketed over the course of the last year or so. The U.S. has had record-high egg prices, which means the most affordable option for some families was to rethink what they ate for breakfast to save some money. Enter breakfast ramen.
Instant ramen is known for being both cheap and convenient. Breakfast Cup Noodles clocks in at a suggested retail price of $1.18, which means that it is actually a food competitively priced with other breakfast foods. In the world of convenient breakfast foods where a burrito or a bagel with cream cheese or a muffin will often cost more than $2 per item, the price is a selling point.
And if it’s true, like the review from The Takeout said, that these noodles do really taste like a pancake, then they might be worth the try if you like pancakes and ramen.
