Great news for ramen enthusiasts: why the noodle dish is about to get much better in Europe, t
What the kamado grill manufacturer Big Green Egg is to barbecue enthusiasts, Sun’s long strands are to purveyors of the Japanese standard.
Now, Sun is coming to improve the lives of ramen fans across Europe and the United Kingdom. On May 8, the company opened a 700-square-metre (7,530-square-foot) facility in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, its first outside the US.
The Hawaii-based, family-owned company has supplied some of the best, most popular ramen spots around the US for decades.These include Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York and Tsujita in Los Angeles.
“This is great news for ramen enthusiasts like myself,” says Ivan Orkin, chef and owner of Ivan Ramen in downtown Manhattan.
“The noodles made by Sun are simply the best – and not just because they successfully scaled my recipe from a 10-seat Tokyo ramen shop into portions for thousands a week.”
The factory cost about €3.5 million (US$3.8 million) to build and will produce about 4 million portions of ramen for customers from London to Warsaw by the end of the year, says Sun Noodle North America president Kenshiro Uki.
Rotterdam was selected for its port and centrality to international markets.
“We are very excited for their opening in Europe,” says John Husby, co-owner and chef de cuisine at Chuka Ramen Bar in Madrid.
“For us and our customers, it means more consistent supply and the ability to use a wider variety of their products.”
He uses three kinds of the noodles: Tokyo wavy for the shoyu ramen, which has a soy sauce broth; matsu for rich tonkotsu ramen; and thick temomi for mazemen ramen, which has no broth.
“Besides making your own noodles, Sun Noodle is the highest-quality noodle in the Western world.”
Husby estimates that Sun’s product costs about 10 per cent more than the closest competition in the fresh-frozen noodle category in Madrid, from the Japanese company Momotaro. (Dried ramen is considerably cheaper but quality is markedly inferior.)
“[It’s] the best noodle quality out there in the market that’s made with proper craft and technique,” says Guy Quirynen, founder and chief executive officer of Ramen Umamido, which has locations around Belgium.
The chef has worked with Sun to create an Umamido noodle with customised thickness, length and chewiness. The Rotterdam opening will enable his company “to go further, customising flour and so on”, Quirynen says.
Sun Noodle was started in the early 1980s by Hidehito Uki, Kenshiro’s father, who came to Hawaii from Japan to get into the ramen business.
It has grown steadily over the past 40 years; Sun now has three factories in the US, including ones on Oahu – Hawaii’s most populous island, Los Angeles and Carlstadt, New Jersey.From those locations, it produces around 300,000 servings of ramen daily; on the US mainland, it makes more than 110 varieties of the noodle, with more than half specially designed to suit one restaurant or group. (In Hawaii, the company produces around 200 kinds of ramen.)
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Ramen has become an increasingly popular dish around the UK and Europe.
Shipments of noodles to Europe have risen by more than 40 per cent over the past seven years, according to Elizabeth Krojansky, the company’s director of marketing, and it currently supplies noodles to more than 75 restaurants around the UK.
Before the new facility opened, Europe took about 5 per cent of the volume from the New Jersey factories.
“By being in the logistics centre of Europe, we’ll be able to reduce freight costs to our food service partners by at least 20 per cent and reduce transit time for our customers,” Krojansky says.
That will help Sun solve some of the issues it has faced in Europe, especially as a result of the supply chain issues that were standard a year ago. “If you order today, you get [the ramen] in two weeks,” Uki says. “Because of ships being delayed sometimes, it became a four-month delay.
“We lost some customers,” he adds.
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Uki says that demand for Sun’s noodles is continually growing in European places both obvious and unexpected. The region’s biggest demand for noodles comes from Paris and London. In Italy, demand is soft, and the Sun Noodle team hopes that market will grow.
Still, Uki says, they have a surprisingly enthusiastic audience in Poland.
“In Warsaw, there’s big enthusiasm for ramen. They are flying over Japanese chefs to teach them how to make it.”
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