Time for a change
You might have noticed that we’ve recently made some changes to our noodles & just wanted to let you know what we’ve done and why…
We are now vegetarian!
For some time we’ve been thinking about going vegetarian – we started in 2010 when vegetarianism was a much smaller thing, and we wanted the flavours we made to have real chicken and beef. What made our pots non vegetarian? We were using small dried chicken cubes and a bit of chicken and beef in one of the natural flavours.
We took a dip into vegetarianism in 2018 through the opportunity to start selling in the USA. There are different legal rules in the US which makes import of EU meats very difficult. We matched our UK flavours with vegetarian versions so we could send our pots over to the USA for our buyers to try, basically we removed the little meat chunks (Let’s be honest – they are a little bit weird) and a small change to the natural flavouring of one recipe.
Taste testing the US flavours was a success! We really liked them. We thought it was hard to taste the difference between the original and vegetarian versions. Whether it’s for animal, environmental or health reasons, it seems everyone is going veggie at the moment – and we are here for it! So we decided to use the USA versions in the UK – this would allow us to go vegetarian and give us an economy of scale across the UK & USA.
We are more affordable!
From raw ingredients to packaging, wages to the cost of driving things around, as I’m sure you’ve all seen over the last few months, the cost of everything has gone up. One of the things that has been most affected is the price of wheat, aka the main ingredient in our noodles.
We’ve always wanted a smaller noodle nest. If you’ve tried the previous Kabuto pots you will have noticed sometimes there was a problem getting the flavours infused into the noodles because of the amount of noodles in there. As part of the ingredient changes we were making, we had the chance to use the same noodle recipe but with a 50g nest rather than a 62g noodle nest. Knowing that this would solve the mixing issue and was the noodle size of our dreams we decided to go for it.
The changes to the ingredients and the changes to the noodles have allowed us to keep all of the good bits of the pots (high quality and 100% natural ingredients) but to sell them at a slightly lower price. Depending on where you are, the aim is to sell them for around £1.65 – we’ve made savings as we’ve brought the size down and taken out the meat; but are passing these savings on.
We are using less plastic!
Plastic and packaging can get technical but a short version is basically our original 85g K3® pot represented a significant sustainability improvement over previous packaging, but was over-engineered, with a high plastic content. The new 65g K3® pot uses far less plastic – helping us work towards our goal of becoming B corp accredited in 2022! Not to mention the packaging design on the pots looks pretty sweet too.
Change is good!
Making changes like this is a big thing for us and is definitely not something our small team of 7 have taken lightly. When faced with rising costs and changing customer demands it was time for us to be a little bit brave and shake things up a bit. We are committed to providing great tasting products with all good ingredients at our core; but doing this has allowed us to make our products accessible to more people. Everyone deserves restaurant quality style ramen – whether you’re on a budget or thinking about the animals.
We’re always grateful to our customers for buying our noodles and don’t take you for granted. We hope you understand why we’ve made the changes and enjoy the new Kabuto Noodle experience!
Thanks,
Crispin, Kabuto Noodles Founder
