Japanese manufacturer files trademark case on ‘Ajinomoto’: How did the seasoning become popular?

The origins of MSG

In 1908, Kikunae Ikeda, a chemistry professor at Tokyo’s Imperial University, reached out to a pharmaceutical firm in the city, Suzuki Pharmaceutical, for help in commercialising a food additive that he had been researching. Ikeda had been inquiring about the reason for the distinctive flavour of kelp, an algae.

The story goes that while savouring a bowl of boiled tofu in a broth made from kelp, he became convinced that there was another basic taste, very different from sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. He called it umami, playing on the Japanese word for delicious. Ikeda’s studies led him to glutamate, one of the most common amino acids in foods – and in the human body. With a dash of sodium, it became monosodium glutamate (MSG). A tasting confirmed the compound’s culinary promise.

In less than a year, the patent office gave its approval to Ajinomoto – a seasoning made by breaking down wheat with hydrochloric acid. The name, literally “quintessence of flavour” was chosen by Saburosuke Suzuki, the then-head of Suzuki Pharma.

But the production process would corrode the vessels. Moreover, all of Suzuki’s marketing couldn’t cloud the fact that Ajinomoto was expensive. According to the company’s own admission, a cup of soba noodles and broth at the time sold for 3 sen. Sen is a hundredth of a yen, the Japanese currency, and a 14-gram Ajinomoto bottle sold for 50 sen). It was not cheap. Finding very little success amongst restaurants, the company began targeting homemakers. But Japanese women, who would regard frugality as a necessary virtue, would find it difficult to regard Ajinomoto as necessary for their kitchens.

Making the seasoning accessible

According to historian Jordan Sand, the company used several tactics to catch their fancy. Its advertisements depicted a woman sporting a white apron and a Western-influenced sokutatsu hairstyle. Ajinomoto was sold in slender glass bottles that resembled perfume holders. The marketers also appealed to the homemakers’ new sense of identity “as a culinary professional”. It roped in cultural figures, including the popular writer, Murai Gensai. In one of Ajinomoto’s first newspaper advertisements, he claimed: “Added to miso soup it brings out the flavor most admirably”. And: “indispensable every morning” and “extremely convenient.”

Even then, it wasn’t till the late 1930s that an Ajinomoto shaker would become as ubiquitous in Japanese homes as ones for salt.

By that time, the company had refined its production process, which included using soy to extract MSG. More importantly, it had taken Ajinomoto to China. Initially, Ajinomoto billboards were seen as symbols of Japanese imperialism. But in a country undergoing a churn, Suzuki’s strategy of marketing Ajinomoto as a flavour for modern times struck a chord.

In less than a decade, the company had a Chinese competitor, Tian Chu (Heavenly Kitchen). According to Sand, Ajinomoto’s Chinese maker touted its product as the “national taste essence; An entirely domestic product; Not the same as the import! Better than Ajinomoto and fairly priced”. It entered the Chinese cooking repertoire as a cheap way to make instant stock and a flavour enhancer for vegetarian meals.

Ajinomoto goes global

Japanese immigrants took Ajinomoto to Hawaii, and the Chinese diaspora took it to North America. In ‘Cook at Home in Chinese’, published in 1938, Henry Low – he had apprenticed at a Chinese food shop in New York’s Chinatown ten years ago and is often credited for inventing the egg roll – listed it as one of the five “Chinese staples one needed to start cooking Chinese in an American kitchen”.

Around the same time, makers of canned soups – Campbell Soup, for example – began using MSG as a flavour enhancer. According to Sand, the key to Ajinomoto’s success lay in repackaging its product in different ways. “In Japan, MSG had become an integral part of mealtime in glass shakers designed for personal use. In Taiwan, it had found its niche in native culinary habits in the form of one-kilogram containers from which shopkeepers sold a pinch at a time”.

Another spurt of popularity came when American soldiers posted in Japan during the Second World War returned home. This was also the time when the American military was trying to find ways to improve the taste of the soldiers’ bland food rations. The new field of frozen foods was another propitious avenue for the flavour enhancer.

Doubts over safety

But in the late 1960s, especially in the US, the consumer trust in food products with chemicals broke down in parts of the West, fueled in large measure by food safety and environmental movements. At times they, coalesced – inadvertently – with some of the racist inclinations of the time in the US: Symptoms such as numbness and a fast heartbeat often came to be referred to as the “Chinese restaurant syndrome”. In the ’70s, Ajinomoto sales fell for the first time in 40 years. But this was also the time that MSG was finding new shores – India, for instance.

It has continued to have its detractors, even as food safety agencies, such as the US FDA, have pronounced MSG safe. The doubters persist even when revisionist culinary studies have revealed that a lot of the bad press Ajinomoto got was because poorly-designed “food safety studies” used five to 30 times the normal amount. As a chemist and the writer of the vastly popular food science work, Masala Labs, Krish Ashok, notes MSG occurs naturally in foods we eat, including tomatoes.