A typical pack of Instant Ramen Noodles comes with freeze-dried noodles and a packet of soup base powder.
What I am curious to know is, which part is more costly (is reflected more in the price) per pack: Soup base packet or the freeze-dried noodles?
Soup base includes the packaging the soup powder is in.
Noodles does not include the outer packaging.
To narrow this down a bit, the brands I am thinking of are Top Ramen and Maruchan Ramen.
I am NOT asking about cup-style noodles (ones that come in/with container to pour hot water in).
Feel free to provide caveats where needed if the above restrictions(*) make answering the question too difficult.
(*) Except for the last one about cup-style noodles.
(Monimonika goes off to make some yakisoba out of some instant ramen packs)
I suspect that the actual meat (or meat-derived flavorings) is such a small part of the flavor packet as to be negligible: In any flavor, it’s going to be mostly salt and MSG.
This is just a guess, but spaghetti costs about $1 a pound at the store price for off brand, and if you assume a packet of ramen has about 3oz of wheat based noodles, that means the noodles themselves cost $0.20 or so since 3oz of pasta w/o any flavoring sauce goes for about $0.20. I’d doubt ramen noodles cost much less than spaghetti ounce per ounce. If anything they may cost more since ramen requires more cooking and ingredients than spaghetti.
Spaghetti has about 1600 calories per pound, while a 3oz package of ramen has about 380 calories. I have no idea how many calories come from the frying of the noodles (I believe they fry them before packaging) but that also adds weight to the idea that the noodles alone are about $0.20.
How much does ramen go for anymore? I thought it was about $0.25 a pack. Sometimes it goes on sale 10 for $1, but that doesn’t happen a lot.
2oz of spaghetti is 200 calories, 10 calories from fat, with 42 grams of carbs.
3oz package of ramen is 380 calories, 140 calories from fat. 52 grams carbs.
So ramen probably has closer to $0.15 worth of wheat based noodles in it if you assume each ounce of wheat based noodles has 21 grams of carbs and costs $0.06. But the frying and the extra steps to cook it add cost (I have no idea how much, what kind of oil they use, or how much it costs). This all assumes the raw wheat ingredients for spaghetti and ramen are about the same.
But at the very least, I think $0.20 for the fried noodles alone is probably a good guess, $0.15 for the wheat noodles and an additional $0.05 or so for the oil to fry them in and the extra ingredients to process ramen. That would make the seasoning packets under $0.05 each if the product goes for a quarter.
I’d suggest taking a slightly different approach. The total cost of the noodles includes material costs, transportation costs, storage costs, processing costs (including frying), and other miscellaneous costs. I strongly suspect that these are all much lower for the seasoning packet contents, even if the seasonings are more expensive on the basis of weight. (Okay, so material costs may be greater than the noodles based on weight alone.)
Conclusion: I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that, as with many products, the expense of simply handling the larger volume component is not an insignificant contributing factor.
They are probably not paying store prices for the pasta. Also they use gigantic quantities; and no doubt gigantic machines to cook and package the tiny noodles.
On the occasion I buy it, it is $3.99 for a box of 24 packs, so a little less than 17 cents per pack. (Available varieties of this type are beef, chicken, and shrimp.)
Spaghetti companies are not paying retail prices either. And there are many different manufacturers of generic pasta. But they all seem to charge about $0.06 an ounce as a price which covers ingredients, processing, shipping, packaging, retail overhead, etc.
So $0.06 per ounce of wheat based noodles seems like a good price point for the noodles plus shipping and packaging. No idea how to remove packaging and shipping costs from that.
Almost the entirety of the cost of all low-end food products is the packaging and the transportation to get it there. I’ve mentioned this before, but cheap wine costs less per bottle wholesale than the empty bottle and label do, to say nothing of the costs of transporting it from the vineyard to the bottler to the warehouse to the distributor to the grocery/liquor store. To say which of the two items in the package costs the company more completely disregards the actual source of costs for the product. Human agriculture is so incredibly efficient now that plain food is absolutely dirt cheap where it’s grown. The reason people are still hungry the world over is that it’s relatively expensive to transport, since its such low value density.
Thanks to all the above commenters on attempting to answer my weird question. Really appreciate it.
Going by the overall feel of the comments, it looks to be that the noodles (with outer packaging?) may be sliiightly more expensive than the soup packet. No definitive answer, but it was great looking at the ways commenters came up with to figure out an answer. Also, I realized that how shipping/packaging/labor costs get interpreted (not only just for the finished product, but also for the ingredients) can drastically change any calculations.
I suspect that I would probably need to break into a ramen factory’s accounting records to see how much of each ingredient costs them and figure out from their product recipe the distribution of the costs per pack. I’m not THAT desperate for the answer, though.
On a restaurant supply website I found 20 pounds of pasta for $21 and 50 pounds of salt for $30. Since the soup base is probably 80% salt, salt is half the price of noodles per ounce, and the noodles outweigh the base significantly, I would think that the noodles are much more expensive than the soup packet.
Seems expensive. Where I buy groceries, those round cardboard containers of salt are three for a dollar. Each one is 1 lb 10 oz, so that is 4.875 pounds per dollar, or around $10 for 50 pounds.
