Nongshim vs Samyang: Sixty Years, One Anonymous Letter, and the Fat That Came Back
Samyang made Korea’s first ramyun in 1963 and held 70% of the market. Nongshim took it with Shin Ramyun. Then a 1989 anonymous letter cost Samyang two thirds of its share over a charge it was acquitted of in 1997. The documented sequence, and where the two companies stand in 2026.
TL;DR — Korea's instant noodle industry has been shaped for sixty years by two companies. Samyang made the first ramyun in 1963 and held over 70% of the market into the mid-1970s. Nongshim took it with three products in five years and Shin Ramyun in 1986. Then in 1989 an anonymous letter accused Samyang of frying noodles in industrial tallow — a charge the health ministry contradicted within three days, that ended in acquittal, and that took until 1997 to clear. Samyang's share fell from about 30% to about 10%. Whoever wrote the letter has never been identified. In 2024 Samyang's market capitalisation passed Nongshim's for the first time, on the back of a single product it launched in 2012 while facing insolvency.
Left: Samyang Ramen, Korea's first instant ramyun, on sale since 1963. Right: Shin Ramyun, launched 1986, which displaced it. Composite of two photographs by Mobius6, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; this composite is likewise CC BY-SA 4.0.
This is a business history, not a partisan account. Where the record is contested or unknown, it says so.
1963: a company started to solve hunger
Samyang Foods' founder, Jeon Jung-yun, was reportedly moved by seeing people queue for a cheap soup made from scraps. Rice was short. What Korea needed was calories that did not require rice.
He went to Japan, where instant noodles already existed, and persuaded Myojo Foods to transfer the technology. Two noodle machines came back with him.
Samyang Ramen went on sale on 15 September 1963: 100 g, 10 won. A chicken-broth soup base, orange packaging. It was Korea's first instant ramyun, and for over a decade it defined the category so completely that the brand name and the product name were interchangeable.
Two details from that origin matter later. The soup was chicken-based. And the noodles were fried in beef tallow — the ordinary frying fat of the era, and the thing that would nearly destroy the company twenty-six years on.
1965–1978: the challenger nobody noticed
Nongshim was founded on 18 September 1965 as Lotte Industrial (롯데공업), by Shin Choon-ho — the younger brother of Lotte's founder Shin Kyuk-ho.
It went badly. Lotte Ramyeon did not sell. Samyang's dominance was near-total; by the mid-1970s Samyang held over 70% of the market, and coverage of the period records that Lotte Industrial considered selling its ramyun business to Samyang outright.
In March 1978 the company was renamed Nongshim. The name is the one it still trades under.
1982–1986: three products and a decision about broth
What turned it was not a single masterstroke but a run of releases, and one strategic choice underneath them.
Samyang's soups were chicken-based. Nongshim went to beef. That sounds minor and was not: it fitted Korean home cooking, where beef broth is the base of the everyday soups people already knew, and it gave Nongshim a flavour direction Samyang could not follow without abandoning its own heritage.
| Year | Nongshim launch |
|---|---|
| Nov 1982 | Neoguri (너구리) |
| Sep 1983 | Ansungtangmyun (안성탕면) |
| 1984 | Chapagetti (짜파게티) |
| Oct 1986 | Shin Ramyun (신라면) |
Shin Ramyun is the one that settled it. A spicy beef broth at a time when no mass-market ramyun was built around heat, sold under a name that is simply the Chinese character for "spicy" — 辛 — which also happens to be the founder's surname. It became, and remains, the reference point for the entire category.
By the late 1980s the positions had reversed. Nongshim led. Samyang was the challenger.
Then came 1989.
1989: the tallow case
This is the part of the story that is most often told badly, in both directions, so here is the documented sequence.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 3 Nov 1989 | An anonymous letter reaches prosecutors alleging that food companies fry noodles in industrial-grade tallow — the kind used for soap and lubricants |
| 3 Nov 1989 | Prosecutors detain ten executives and staff across five companies: Samyang Foods, Samlip Oils, Seoul Heinz, Ottogi Foods and Busan Oils |
| 6 Nov 1989 | The Ministry of Health concludes the products are harmless |
| Late Nov 1989 | The government states officially that tallow-made products pose no danger to health |
| 28 Nov 1989 | Everyone detained has been released |
| 1997 | The Supreme Court acquits. More than eight years after the arrests |
The immediate coverage did not wait for the ministry. Korean media retrospectives on the case — including Media Today, which called it a case of "the worst kind of dictation from the prosecutor's office" — treat it as a failure of press scrutiny as much as of prosecution.
The commercial damage arrived long before the acquittal:
- Over one million boxes of ramyun destroyed
- Roughly 1,000 employees left the company
- Market share fell from around 30% to around 10%
And the point that gets lost: the tallow was never shown to be unsafe. The question in the case was a classification — whether tallow imported under a US grade not designated for food could lawfully be used in food — not whether anyone had been harmed. The health ministry answered the safety question in three days. The legal question took eight years, and Samyang won it.
Who sent the letter has never been established. It is worth being blunt about this, because the vacuum has been filled with speculation for thirty-six years, most of it pointing at commercial rivals. No investigation has ever identified the author, and no court has ever attributed it. Anyone who tells you they know is telling you something the record does not contain.
Samyang stopped frying in beef tallow and moved to palm oil. It stayed on palm oil for 36 years.
1990s–2010s: two different companies
The decade after the case, Nongshim consolidated. Shin Ramyun became a domestic default and then an export product; Nongshim built local production abroad and pushed a portfolio — Shin, Ansungtangmyun, Neoguri, Chapagetti — rather than a single hit.
Samyang spent those years much smaller. By the early 2010s it was, by its own later accounts, in serious financial trouble.
In 2012 it launched Buldak Bokkeummyun — a stir-fried noodle built around extreme heat, into a Korean spicy-food trend. Domestically it was a modest success. What happened next was not planned by anyone.
From about 2014, "fire noodle challenge" videos spread internationally. The product's appeal turned out to be transferable in a way flavour rarely is: the pitch was not "this tastes Korean", it was "I bet you can't". Later, Denmark's recall of several Buldak variants on capsaicin-content grounds generated more attention than any campaign could have bought.
2024–2026: the reversal, and its asterisk
In 2024 Samyang's market capitalisation passed Nongshim's. Overseas sales reached about 77% of Samyang's revenue, of which roughly 89.7% was Buldak.
The recent figures:
| Nongshim | Samyang Foods | |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 revenue | ₩3.5143 trillion (+2.2%) | ₩2.3518 trillion (+36%) |
| 2025 operating profit | — | ₩523.9 billion (+52%) |
| Domestic entity, 2025 | −2.1% | — |
| Overseas share of revenue | — | ~80% |
| Q1 2026 domestic offline retail | ₩343.7 billion, #1 | — |
| Category penetration | 52.3% | — |
Both halves of that table are true at once, and this is the part most coverage picks a side on.
Samyang is growing far faster and is now worth more. A 36% revenue increase against 2.2% is not a close race.
Nongshim still owns the Korean shelf. It remains number one in domestic offline retail and its penetration figure — the share of households buying at least one of its products — is above half the category. Samyang's growth is overwhelmingly outside Korea, from one product line.
Which makes the concentration the open question. Roughly four-fifths of Samyang's revenue comes from abroad and roughly nine-tenths of that from Buldak. That is spectacular while the trend runs, and it is a single point of failure. Nongshim's problem is the mirror image: a broad, stable, domestically anchored portfolio that grew 2.2% last year and shrank at home.
2025–2026: the tallow comes back
Which is the context for what Samyang did next.
On 3 November 2025 — thirty-six years to the day after the letter — Samyang launched "Samyang 1963", a premium ramyun fried in beef tallow.
The company's public reasoning is culinary: reinterpreting "the advantages of the beef tallow used 60-odd years ago to suit today's manufacturing technology and consumer tastes." The date is not mentioned in the press material. It does not need to be.
It sold 7 million units in its first month — about 80% of original Samyang Ramen's monthly average for the year — at ₩6,150 per four-pack, roughly ₩1,538 each, against ₩800–1,000 for ordinary ramyun. Content about it drew around 80 million views. A pop-up sold out its Naver booking in five minutes and drew over 10,000 visitors in seven days.
Jjareureu, a beef-tallow jjajang, followed on 8 July 2026, extending the same heritage into Nongshim's strongest home category — Chapagetti has owned Korean jjajang ramyun since 1984.
A company that was nearly destroyed by an allegation about beef tallow is now selling beef tallow as the premium feature, at double the price, into its rival's category. Whatever else it is, it is not a subtle piece of positioning. The details and reception numbers are in the product comparison.
What the sixty years actually show
The 1989 case is not a story about food safety. The safety question was resolved in three days by the ministry. What took eight years was a classification dispute, and the company won it. The lasting damage was done by coverage that ran ahead of the finding, and the commercial verdict was delivered years before the legal one.
Market position is more fragile than it looks and slower to change than it feels. Samyang went from 70% to 10% — but the collapse took a scandal, and the recovery took twenty-three years and a product nobody predicted.
The two companies have never competed the same way. Nongshim wins by portfolio breadth and domestic depth; Samyang has twice won by a single product doing something nobody else was doing — extreme heat in 2012, and now a frying fat everyone else abandoned. Both strategies have produced a period of dominance. Neither has produced a permanent one.
What this article does not settle
Who sent the 1989 letter. Unknown, and treated as unknown here. The absence of an answer is not evidence for any particular one.
Whether the beef-tallow line lasts. One month of launch figures, all company-reported, is not a trend. Analysts quoted at the time doubted premium pricing would hold with price-sensitive younger buyers.
Whether Samyang's overseas position is durable. Concentration at roughly 80% overseas and roughly 90% of that in one product line is a fact; whether it is a risk or simply a very good product is not decidable from the numbers.
Figures here come from company disclosures and Korean press reporting. Market share and revenue statements are as reported; where a number originates with a company rather than an auditor, this article says so.
FAQ
What was the 1989 Korean tallow scandal?
On 3 November 1989 an anonymous letter led prosecutors to detain ten people at five food companies, alleging noodles were fried in industrial-grade beef tallow. The Ministry of Health found the products harmless on 6 November and all detainees were released by 28 November, but the case ran until a Supreme Court acquittal in 1997. Samyang's market share fell from about 30% to about 10% in the meantime.
Was the beef tallow actually dangerous?
No finding ever said so. The health ministry declared the products harmless within three days. The legal question was whether tallow imported under a US grade not designated for food could be used in food — a classification issue, not a demonstrated harm — and the courts ultimately found for the companies.
Who reported Samyang to the prosecutors?
Unknown. The letter was anonymous and its author has never been identified by any investigation or court. Speculation has circulated for decades; none of it is established.
Which came first, Samyang Ramen or Shin Ramyun?
Samyang Ramen, by 23 years. It launched on 15 September 1963 as Korea's first instant ramyun. Shin Ramyun launched in October 1986.
Is Nongshim or Samyang bigger?
It depends which measure. Nongshim had larger 2025 revenue (₩3.51tn vs ₩2.35tn) and leads Korean domestic retail with 52.3% category penetration. Samyang grew far faster (+36% vs +2.2%) and its market capitalisation passed Nongshim's in 2024, driven by overseas Buldak sales that make up about 80% of its revenue.
Why did Samyang bring beef tallow back in 2025?
Officially, to reinterpret the frying method used when it made Korea's first ramyun in 1963. It launched Samyang 1963 on 3 November 2025 — the same calendar date as the 1989 tip-off — and sold 7 million units in the first month at roughly 1.5–2× ordinary ramyun prices.
← Back to all posts