A liquor shop, dried noodles and a city’s name.

Sapporo Ichiban is made by Sanyo Foods, a company that started a long way from Sapporo. In November 1953, Fumio Ida and his eldest son Takeshi Ida, who ran a liquor-sales business in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, diversified into dried noodles and founded Fuji Seimen, the company says; Fumio Ida became its first president. In April 1961 the firm began making instant noodles alongside dried ones, and that year it took the name Sanyo Foods. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the company, says the name, meaning “three oceans,” expressed the hope of a business that would range across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Its own brands came quickly. The company dates its first, Piyo Piyo Ramen, to July 1963, and says it was the first Sanyo product advertised on television. In August 1964 came Nagasaki Tanmen, which the company calls the industry’s first salt-flavoured and first regional-style instant ramen. Then, in January 1966, Sanyo launched Sapporo Ichiban, a soy-sauce ramen. The name, “Sapporo number one,” came from Takeshi Ida, then senior managing director, who had eaten his way around Japan’s ramen and was most impressed by Sapporo’s, Oricon News reported in 2022.

Two more flavours turned the name into a range. Miso ramen followed in September 1968 and shio (salt) ramen in September 1971, the company says; the original was later renamed Shōyu-aji, “soy-sauce flavour,” Japanese Wikipedia says. Each uses a different noodle, according to Natsume Yukiaki’s 2009 book Nippon “Mono Monogatari”, cited by Japanese Wikipedia: square in cross-section for soy sauce, oval for miso and round for shio. The company says the series carried Sanyo to the top of the industry, and that by September 2003 Sapporo Ichiban had passed 25 billion servings. The Cup Star cup noodle followed in January 1975.

Two slogans, a blue arrow and dancing vegetables.

The packs carry small, deliberate details. The original soy-sauce pack read “Sokuseki rāmen wa Sapporo Ichiban,” roughly “for instant ramen, Sapporo Ichiban,” Japanese Wikipedia says; that line has since given way to “Umasa Sapporo ni ari!!”, “flavour lies in Sapporo.” The blue arrow-like mark at the top right of the soy-sauce pack was Takeshi Ida’s idea, but even inside the company its meaning is disputed, Shūpure News, the website of Weekly Playboy, reported in 2014. The lettering differs between flavours, too: the miso pack spells ramen in angular katakana and the shio pack in softer hiragana, as Japanese Wikipedia notes, citing the company’s history. In September 2013 the bag noodles moved to aluminium packaging, the encyclopedia says.

Advertising built the name nationally. For the launch, Shūpure News reported, Sanyo used what it called the industry’s first area marketing: the comedy group The Drifters, then rising fast, in the Kantō region and the veteran comic actor Soganoya Meichō in Kansai. Japanese Wikipedia says the actor Takuya Fujioka was the face of the miso ramen from 1969 to 2004, and that the shio ramen’s commercial, in which vegetables sprout and dance to a “hakusai, shiitake, ninjin” jingle, ran from 1971 until July 2010. The miso ramen’s sound logo was composed by Keiichi Tanno, CD Journal reported in 2006.

Recognition has come from the food trade. Sanyo says the original Sapporo Ichiban received a long-seller award from the trade newspaper Nihon Shokuryo Shimbun in 1990, and the miso ramen another in 2019. The brand marked its 50th anniversary in January 2016. Outside Japan, English Wikipedia lists markets including Hong Kong, the United States, Mexico, Argentina and Canada.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all food and coffee names from Japan: Marukome, Hagoromo, Nagatanien, Sapporo Ichiban, UCC, Boss and Georgia. Japanese food and coffee brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal, snack or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family company, Gunma factories and a US plant.

Sanyo Foods has been led by the Ida family throughout: Takeshi Ida became its second president in February 1976 and Junichiro Ida its third in June 1998, the company says. Its registered head office is in Akasaka, Tokyo, while its administrative headquarters and main plant are in Maebashi. Japanese Wikipedia says Sapporo Ichiban is made at the Maebashi plant and at factories in Yamatokōriyama, Nara, and Iizuka, Fukuoka, run by the subsidiary Taihei Shokuhin Kōgyō, plus a partner factory in Chiba, and that each pack carries a code showing its plant. The brand is named after Sapporo, but the company has no factory in Hokkaido, the encyclopedia notes. Sanyo Foods is a separate company from Sapporo Breweries, the beer maker.

Abroad, Sanyo set up a United States subsidiary in February 1978, the company says, and Sapporo Ichiban for the US and Canadian market is made in Garden Grove, California, English Wikipedia says. Sanyo has also built ties across Asia and Africa. In July 1981 it formed a capital alliance with the Osaka noodle maker Acecook, which Japanese Wikipedia lists as a subsidiary. In July 1999 it took a stake in Tingyi, the Chinese maker of Master Kong noodles, and in 2013 it set up Olam Sanyo Foods in Nigeria with the Singapore-based trader Olam International, according to the company’s history.

For a design guide, Sapporo Ichiban shows how a borrowed city name, a red pack and an unexplained blue arrow can hold a brand steady for six decades. Compare Acecook, the Osaka noodle maker allied with Sanyo since 1981, and Master Kong, the Chinese noodle brand in which Sanyo holds a stake. For this guide we use an Ichiban red, an arrow blue and a noodle cream with a heavy Japanese sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sapporo Ichiban’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.