Maggi has followed me across oceans. At New York University in Abu Dhabi, where the dining hall rotated between pasta, shawarma, and paneer, it was the one thing that still tasted of home. I’d stash packets of curry Maggi in my suitcase after each trip back to Malaysia, guarding them like treasure. On nights when the city outside felt too foreign and the dorm too sterile, I’d tear open a packet, boil it on the tiny hot plate we weren’t supposed to have, and watch the steam fog up my dorm window. I’d eat it crouched by the bed, texting my sister a photo of the yolk set just right, feeling—for a moment—like I was back in my mother’s kitchen.
That packet wasn’t just a meal. It was a product of global capitalism, brilliant branding, and just the right amount of monosodium glutamate (MSG). Invented in late-19th century Switzerland as a cheap, hearty meal for working-class women, it arrived in Singapore in 1969 through Nestlé’s global expansion. Hardly a product born of the kampung—yet by the 1970s, it was being produced in Jurong. In 1980, Nestlé opened its first Asian research and development centre in Singapore to fine-tune its flavours for South-east Asian palates. Through aggressive localisation and marketing campaigns that blended familiarity with aspiration, Maggi rewrote its origin story. Today, it’s not sold as a Swiss invention, it’s sold as a taste of home.
The slogan, “Fast to Cook, Good to Eat,” was not just a promise, but a perfect pitch for a country hurtling towards modernity. This was a moment when industrialisation, food convenience, and mass media operated in lockstep—where factory lines fed dinner tables and advertising reshaped appetites. Maggi didn’t follow the rhythm of modern life; it set it.
Around the world, industrialisation reshaped not just work, but food. Processed meals emerged to feed a world too busy to cook. In Europe, Knorr—founded in 1838—pioneered dehydrated soups and stock cubes designed for postwar recovery. In the United States, Campbell’s canned soup, Kellogg’s boxed cereals, and Swanson’s TV dinners became staples during the second industrial wave. In Japan, Nissin’s Instant Ramen (1958) similarly responded to postwar food insecurity, hailed as “magic ramen” for transforming boiling water into a meal. Its true breakthrough came with Cup Noodles (1971), which swapped bowls for disposable cups and plastic forks. Portable and self-contained, it redefined not just convenience, but the act of eating itself.
Portable meals, of course, were nothing new. Sri Lankan lamprais or Malaysian nasi lemak wrapped in banana leaf, had long sustained workers on the move. The difference was that industrialisation now produced meals designed not to be shared, but to be eaten quickly, often alone. Instant noodles slotted neatly into the rhythms of Singapore’s urbanising society: smaller households, rushed schedules, and meals increasingly stripped of communal ritual.
