Vaunted producer Sun Noodles has just opened a factory in Rotterdam to supply the continent.
(Bloomberg) — A bowl of ramen sits in front of you, broth steaming and studded with a soft egg, pinwheel fish cakes and plump chashu, or braised pork belly. You hoist a judicious amount of noodles, ready for a satisfying slurp.
At this moment, the noodle is everything. If too soft or too tough, stale tasting or sticky, the ramen might well be ruined.
In the US, the company ramen experts count on to avoid disaster is Sun Noodles. What the Big Green Egg is to grill 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 UK. On May 8, the company opened a 700-square-meter (7,535-square-foot) facility in Rotterdam, 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 is great news for ramen enthusiasts like myself,” says Ivan Orkin, chef and owner of the seminal 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 ($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 Kenshiro Uki, president of Sun Noodle North America. 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, which has a soy sauce broth; matsu for rich tonkotsu; and temomi for mazemen, which has no broth. “Besides making your own noodles, SN is the highest-quality noodle in the Western world.”
Husby estimates that Sun’s product costs about 10% 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.)
“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 in Belgium. The chef has worked with Sun to create an umamido noodle with customized thickness, length and chewiness. The Rotterdam opening will enable his company “to go further, customizing flour and so on,” says Quirynen.
Sun Noodles 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 It has grown steadily over the past 40 years; Sun now has three factories in the US, including ones in Oahu, Los Angeles and Carlstadt, New Jersey, near Teterboro. 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.)
Ramen has become an increasingly popular dish around the UK and Europe. Shipments of noodles to Europe have risen by more than 40% over the past seven years, according to Elizabeth Krojansky, the company’s director of marketing, and they currently supply noodles to more than 75 restaurants around the UK. Before the new facility opened, Europe took about 5% of the volume from the New Jersey factories. “By being in the logistics center of Europe, we’ll be able to reduce freight costs to our food service partners by at least 20% and reduce transit time for our customers,” she says.
That will help Sun solve some of the issues they’ve 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,” says Uki. “Because of ships being delayed sometimes, it became a four-month delay.” He adds: “We lost some customers.”
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 an surprisingly enthusiastic audience in Poland. “In Warsaw, there’s big enthusiasm for ramen,” Uki says. “They are flying over Japanese chefs to teach them to make it.”
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