Local noodles, local flavours

Gone were the days where instant noodles were simply dried noodle blocks. To stay ahead of the competition, instant noodle companies have come up with noodle types and flavours that are familiar to Asian palettes. Anyone feeling homesick can instantly get a taste of home by grabbing a curry flavoured maggi mee, or by slurping a bowl of jjajangmyeon (black bean sauce noodles) while watching mukbang videos (eating broadcasts) for the full experience.

Types of Noodles

Enterprising companies have found a way to convert various asian noodles into instant ones. Noodle types are plotted based on how many times they occur in the dataset.

Noodle types that are common also tend to be quite versatile. Take udon for example. It may have originated from Japan, but countries like South Korea have given it their own spin with the pojangmacha (street food) udon.

Click the icons for more information about the noodle type. Mouse over the icons for more information about the noodle type Maggi Back to Story

Instant noodles flavours

Perhaps you have eaten tom yum-flavoured instant noodles before even trying the real tom yum soup. The diversity of instant noodles flavours has enabled people to sample different cuisines at an affordable price.

Distribution of flavours across countries

Click to select a flavour and see its distribution across countries.

Curry and spicy flavours are most well-loved across Asia, which makes sense as a lot of its cuisines use spice.

Portion Sizes

We have a theory: instant noodles sizes are proportionate to the size of the people. To test it out, we compared the average weight of the population (male and female) with the weight of each country’s most common instant noodles.

Average mass of person against the average mass of 1 serving size of the most common instant noodle per country

Surprisingly, the lightest (India) and heaviest (Taiwan) people do have the lightest (70g) and heaviest (200g) instant noodle packets. But everything else in between does not support our theory. If we consider the sheer variety of instant noodles that exists, it makes sense that companies would not be able to tailor the portion size of instant noodles to each country.