Nissin Foods (日清食品)

In 1958, in an Osaka shed, Momofuku Ando spent a year working out how to dehydrate a cooked noodle: flash frying. Chikin Ramen was born, and with it an entire food category. Thirteen years later, watching Americans break his noodle bricks into cups, he invented the Cup Noodle — container, fork and meal in a single object.

Nissin has since sold over fifty billion servings and built two instant-noodle museums in Japan. The company remains inseparable from a post-war image: a country short of rice that built one of the world's great food industries on American wheat.