Hungarians keep buying instant soups in bulk

Although mainly Asian countries are considered large consumers, many Europeans were also included in the TOP50 countries with the highest demand: Hungary is among them. On an annual level, Hungarians get 4.1 servings of zacsis soup per person, which means that we ranked 38th in the world among the countries examined. Of course, this does not even come close to Vietnam, South Korea, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia or Japan, where 10 times or even 20 times as many servings of instant noodles are consumed annually as in our country – writes Pénzcentrum.

Instant soups were invented in Japan more than 60 years ago, in 1958. The original was inspired by the Japanese ramen soup, and the characteristic wavy egg soup noodles in dried form are still typical of instant soups today. Shortly after its invention, it began to spread explosively around the world, and the demand for bagged soups has been growing ever since. In the meantime, the noodle soups were supplemented with small bags of spice mix and fat, and then, in some versions, pieces of dried vegetables also appeared. From the 70s, the glass version also became common, which really only requires hot water and a spoon. There are also many variations in flavoring.

While 97.49 billion servings were sold worldwide in 2015, in the year before the epidemic in 2019, 106.42 billion were sold, according to data from the World Instant Noodles Association. Last year, 118.18 billion portions were consumed, that is, almost 324 million instants per day! It seems that the direct and indirect effects of the coronavirus epidemic have significantly increased the consumption of instant noodle soups in the world, because in 2020 116.56 billion servings of soup were consumed worldwide, which was 1.4 percent less than last year’s consumption, but 9.5 percent more , as in 2019.