The Japanese company Ajinomoto (meaning 'essence of taste') was formed in 1909 to market which popular food ingredient?
Taste their correspondence with the four tastes of ancient Greek philosophy. Umami, or “scrumptiousness”, was first studied with the scientific method and identified by Kikunae Ikeda, who began to analyze kombu in 1907, attempting to isolate its dashi taste. He isolated a substance he called "ajinomoto", Japanese for “at the origin of flavor”. His Ajinomoto Co., Inc. currently employs over 32,000 people. "Ajinomoto" was later identified as the chemical monosodium glutamate (MSG), and increasingly used independently as a food additive, it is a sodium salt that produces a strong savory taste, especially combined with foods rich in nucleotides such as meats,
Ajinomoto Before the eventual publicity, the conglomerate was founded on Ikeda's work: it was the first to suggest that industrially purified glutamic acid salts, residues or analogues, originally found in seaweed or dried fish-based broth, might have a characteristic taste of its own. That idea was rapidly connected to the much older Japanese, culinary term of umami. This led to early adoption of MSG as a culinary agent in Japan. Ajinomoto is the world's largest manufacturer of MSG. Ajinomoto group entered the frozen food business in 1972 and went on to expand into an integrated sales company in 2000 in Japan,