Check out frozen food trends from Part 1!

HIYASHI-CHUKA is a summer staple that people crave during the hot season. Many of you may be eagerly awaiting the HIYASHI-CHUKA are now available" signs posted in stores.

However, making HIYASHI-CHUKA at home is a bit of a challenge. You have to boil water, cook the noodles, tightly seal them in cold water, wash and cut the colorful ingredients, and serve them ....... Just standing in the kitchen in the summer in Japan, you will break out in a sweat. By the time it is ready, you are drenched in sweat.

And some may feel that it is not worth it to prepare only one serving.

If only it were easy to make HIYASHI-CHUKA for one meal....
Nichirei Foods has launched the sale of a dreamlike product that met such needs in 2022.

Open the package and you will find ice on top of the noodles. After removing the sauce bag, microwave the noodles with the ice. After heating, simply pour the sauce over the noodles, loosen the noodles, and top with the optional ingredients, and in no time at all, your HIYASHI-CHUKA is ready. There is no need to cool the noodles under running water and tighten the noodles.

The product form in which cold noodle is made in a microwave oven has been the subject of much comment on social networking sites, with some people saying,
"I don't understand why it's cold after microwaving."
"It confuses my brain."
and "It's truly cold."

Can you really make cold HIYASHI-CHUKA in a microwave oven?
We tested this by using a thermo camera.

Okumura of the Product Development Department says that this technique of chilling the noodles completely was the key to the development of HIYASHI-CHUKA.
As the name implies, HIYASHI-CHUKA is a cold dish, which means that after heating in the microwave, the noodles must somehow be made cold. The prerequisite of "cold" was the biggest hurdle in the product development process.

In Japan, the social background of increasing dual income households, single-person households, and the elderly population has led to the "externalization of food," in which people use processed foods, prepared foods, and food service instead of cooking from ingredients in the home. In addition, demand for "individual meals" within the home has been growing as the tendency for individuals to freely choose what to eat according to time and place of consumption and taste/menu preferences has spread.

Individual meals" also fit perfectly with the concerns of the welfare and school meal service industries, such as "accommodating different meals for different users" and "covering manpower shortages," and are attracting attention.

In addition, when Nichirei Foods began developing HIYASHI-CHUKA in 2019, we were in the midst of the COVID-19. Both at home and in the restaurant industry, the need for "individual meals" that can be easily prepared for one person was receiving a tailwind.

Nichirei Foods has been expanding its product lineup to meet this growing need for "individual meals" that transcends the boundaries of conventional categories and business categories, which we see as personal use demand. In our search for new products, we focused on HIYASHI-CHUKA.

However, the absence of HIYASHI-CHUKA in the frozen food section naturally means that "frozen" HIYASHI-CHUKA are a product that Nichirei Foods has yet to introduce to the world.

And the appeal of today's frozen foods is that they can be easily completed simply by heating in a microwave oven. If the noodles have to be cooled and tightened, there is no point in selling them as a frozen food.

How can we achieve both "ease" and "coldness?
Can this product really be realized?

The clue to the solution lay in a patented technology acquired about 20 years ago.

In 2008, Nichirei Foods obtained a patent for the technology of putting noodles, sauce, and ice together in a bag, heating it in a microwave oven, and then mixing it.

Compared to water, ice is less sensitive to microwaves and does not melt easily when heated in a microwave oven. Therefore, when noodles and ice are heated together in a microwave oven, only the noodles are heated, and the remaining melted ice can be used to cool the noodles.

However, it was not commercialized at the time. This was because if the noodles, sauce, and ice were all packaged together in a bag, the noodles would be soaked in the sauce for a long time, and by the time they reached the customer, the appearance and texture of the noodles would be spoiled.

We came up with two ideas.
One was to put the noodles in trays instead of bags.
The second was to package the sauce individually and serve it separately.
By separating the noodles from the sauce, we wanted to maintain the deliciousness of each.

However, these two ideas were not immediately successful.

Take, for example, the size of the ice.
When defrosted in a microwave oven, the remaining ice cubes will disappear at just the right moment as the sauce is mixed with the noodles.

We also created an exquisite non-frozen sauce that can be quickly poured over the noodles after taking them out of the bag.

Separating the noodles from the sauce also had an unexpected effect.

In this way, Nichirei Foods was able to perfect a new microwave cold process through the technological expertise and know-how it has accumulated over the years.

However, there was one more hurdle to overcome for HIYASHI-CHUKA.
That was the making of noodles.

In fact, Nichirei Foods did not sell any Chinese noodle products at the time, so we had to start from the noodle making process.

What is the perfect noodle for HIYASHI-CHUKA that Nichirei Foods has come up with? The most eye-catching part of the noodle is the braised pork!

The hidden commitment is described in Part 3: Part3: Freshly-boiled taste is realized in frozen food. A closer look at the making of  HIYASHI-CHUKA.