Nissin’s marketing department does a good job keeping its famous Cup Noodle product in the news. That includes inventing crazy products that may never see the light of day. Now, one of the company’s silly but popular inventions is, once again, available for sale.
The last time we checked in with Nissin, they were hawking a new “gamer noodle” that contained caffeine. (It actually wasn’t that bad.) The company has also advertised specialty products for preparing and eating the famed dish, such as a measuring cup painted with the markings to measure the perfect amount of water for different cup sizes.
Nissin has used social media reactions to determine whether to turn these borderline shitposts into actual products. It did end up selling the Cup Noodle, for example. (It now appears to be sold out and only available for a pretty penny from resellers.)
Now, it’s done the same thing to another product just to show fans that they’re not squidding around.
In April, to promote its Seafood Noodle variety, the company posted a picture of the product being eaten with a squid fork.
“This here’s the best use for a fork,” it wrote, making a pun from the Japanese words 生かす (ikasu), to put to good use, and イカ (ika), squid.
Fans lapped it up and responded with squid jokes of their own (none of which work well in English, trust me). The post went viral, ultimately netting the company 77,000 likes and 11K retweets.
That popularity was enough to convince Nissin that there was gold in them thar hills. Nissin’s now selling a limited edition run of the fork along with a set of eight noodles: two regular, two seafood, and one each of curry, cheese curry, chili tomato, and miso flavor.
If you’re a Cup Noodle fan, hurry and get yours while they last. The sets are on sale for 4,675 yen (USD $30) until January 31st. You can grab the set from either the Nissin website or from Amazon JP (affiliate link).
(Sorry, folks outside Japan – neither Nissin nor Amazon will ship this overseas. Maybe see if you can convince Tenso to do it.)
Nissin isn’t the only company to profit from the shitposts-to-product pipeline. Meiji, the maker of the popular Kinoko no Yama chocolate cracker candy, now sells Kinoko no Yama-shaped wireless earphones created by a popular Japanese product designer.
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