All About Ramen
Jun Bae, Celia Jin, Ovie Soman
Introduction
Ramen was born in China, and made its way over to Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Over the years, it has become an integral part of Japanese cuisine and culture. The United States welcomed ramen in the seventies as a nourishing and fulfilling fast-food item. Today, stacks and stacks of ramen of different flavours and varieties can be found in any American departmental store and are go-to items, especially for starving college students. Our group loves ramen just as much as any other college-going group, and we decided to take our love for this delicious food to the next level — the data science level. This article explores top ramen producing nations, most popular and highly-rated ramen brands and most-preferred packaging styles for ramen. We used ‘Ramen Ratings’ on Kaggle as our data set for this article.
Popularity, Popularity, Popularity
Our group first focused on what people were looking for when it comes to ramen. The following infographic shows the most Internet-searched ramen-related words worldwide.
‘Instant’ is a major search, as can be seen above. People prefer ramen that doesn’t take too long to make. This points to ramen’s cultural niche in America as an ‘on-the-go’ item — people turn to ramen when they would like something low-effort yet delicious. ‘Flavour’ and ‘Flavor’ are prominent searches. “Beef”, “Chicken” and “Spicy” are favourite flavours. The preferred flavors are clearly culture-specific. We can spot a variety of Asian features in the upper right figure, such as Thai goong, Japanese tempura, Phillipine pancit, Korean buldak, etc. Preferred packaging styles are led clearly by “Cup”-packaging, followed by “Bowl”-packaging.
After collecting the above general information, our team was ready to delve into the specifics of ramen production. We first took a look at the countries that lead the race of ramen production.
Top Producers
The following graph shows the top eleven global ramen producers at a glance. Japan tops the list, followed by the USA and South Korea. All the countries listed apart from the USA are Asian.
This shows that ramen production is still mostly handled by the general area of its origin. This reinforces the point about culture-specific flavours. Ramen flavours are so unique to Asia as most nations making ramen are from Asian countries.
Rave Ratings
In our research, we considered upward of a thousand ramen brands. Of these, the top-rated brands include “Prima”, “Takamori”, “Jackpot Teriyaki” and “Tao Kae Noi”.
Prima Taste (the complete brand name) originates from Singapore, while Takamori comes from Japan. Jackpot Teriyaki comes from the USA, and Tao Kae Noi is from Thailand. These countries are all on the list of top ramen producers.
We sought ramen rating distributions by country. South-east Asian countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, show the highest ratings, followed by Japan and South Korea. Countries with ratings clustered toward the higher side include Sarawak and Brazil. Our group looked deeper into the countries with the highest-rated ramen. Malaysia tops the list with an average rating of 4.154, followed by Singapore (4.126), Indonesia (4.067), Japan (3.982) and Hong Kong (3.797). Looking back on our graph of the top ramen producers, we saw that there is no recognisable correlation between the ratings and the amount of ramen produced. The quality and quantity of ramen are independent and unrelated.
We then moved onto the distribution of ratings by ramen flavour. This helped us to discern the flavours that were most enjoyed.
Curry is by far the highest rated flavour, with a 4.25 average rating. Seafood, pork, chicken and beef, the remaining flavours, are popular foods in Asia as well as the USA.
Pack-style packaging is the most popular in Taiwan, while bowl-style packaging is the most popular in Japan. Cup-style packaging is the most prominent in Hong Kong. Japan, South Korea and the USA are at the forefront of all three packaging styles. These countries are also in the list of the top eleven ramen-producing countries.
Examining the score distribution for 5 distinct types of package leads to an intriguing discovery: the ‘Box’ type of packing used for ramen got most highly rated. The scores for ramen with ‘Box‘ packing are concentrated at the range above 4.5 and the distribution has no lower tail in the 0–4 range. This is significantly different from the other four package styles, and thus might be a useful reference for the producers to consider.
What’s the data say about Ramen?
Our investigation into ramen led to several interesting discoveries. We arrived at several results pertaining to ramen brands, flavours as well as packaging. These are salient points for ramen manufacturers to consider in order to expand their reach and, therefore, their sales. The demand for ramen is great in today’s fast-paced world, and we hope our article may help producers to keep up. Furthermore, we wish to deepen our research further. Possible avenues for future investigation include considering portion sizes and specific profiles of top ramen brands.
