What will happen when an instant food star and flop meet?

There are a lot of parallels between pizza in America and ramen in Japan. They’re both filling, convenient, and inexpensive, making them favorites of hungry and/or cash-strapped students and bachelors, and so perhaps it was only a matter of time until Nissin hit upon this idea.


The product’s full name is the Cup Noodle Cheese Pizza Potato Tomato Flavor Big, befitting its status as part of the company’s jumbo-sized Cup Noodle Big line. Because if pizza and ramen each have an uncompromising, iron-clad grip on your soul and stomach, statistics suggest you might just have a big appetite.

The ramen’s Italian inspirations show up in the cheese tomato broth, floating in which you’ll find the customary Cup Noodle noodles accompanied by chunks of potato, cabbage, cheddar cheese squares, and bits of bacon-style pork (oddly enough, despite Japan’s love of corn on pizza, the yellow veggie is nowhere to be found on the ingredient list). Nissin boasts that the delicate basil seasoning blends with the tartness of the tomato and richness of the cheese for a scrumptiously synergetic sensation on the taste buds.

Skeptics no doubt have already sniffed out a potential problem, though. While you’d never mistake it for gourmet fare, instant ramen is almost always satisfying in the flavor department, in a sort of salty, guilty-pleasure way. Instant pizza, though, is generally something most people choose to eat as a last resort when they run out of other options, rather than as something they enjoy the taste of.

Still, there’s a chance that the pizza ramen will still be as delicious as Nissin assures us it will. After all, ramen pizza turned out to be pretty good, and Cup Noodle’s chili tomato flavor has been a big seller for years, so we’re keeping our hopes high that Cup Noodle Cheese Pizza Potato Tomato Flavor won’t let us down when it goes on sale November 13 for 205 yen (US$1.85).

Source: Nissin via Hachima Kiko
Images: Nissin