Many years ago, I watched a TV commercial of UK automaker Rover Company, saying there would be nothing to proudly introduce in UK other than Rover and fish & chips. Similarly, average Japanese are not able to have pleasant days without curry rice nor ramen noodles.
Gourmet Innovation[J], a Tokyo-based start-up operating an e-commerce site for the home delivery of frozen ready-made meals from popular ramen diners across the country, launched a donation program last week for serving ramen meals to the disaster victims. You may place an order from three donation choices of 1000 yen for serving 4 persons (4 bowls of ramen), 5000 yen for 20 persons (20 bowls of ramen) and 10000yen for 100 persons (100 bowls of ramen). The company expects to deliver packs of ready-made noodles to evacuation sites having water boiling facilities, or come to evacuation sites and cook noodles for the victims onsite.
On the Japanese websphere, the service is better known under its service name Takumen[J] than the company’s name. More than 9000 users have signed up for placing orders of the Japanese instant soul food. Gourmet Innovation was founded last year by Takuma Inoue (@GI_Inoue[J]) for giving the opportunities to earn additional revenues for ramen diner owners, and also for allowing ramen freaks to try inexperienced taste without visiting far-located diners.
Masaru IKEDA