Pictures of the inner workings of the Ting Yi factory, one of China’s largest food companies, have surfaced on the internet this week, shocking many ramen fans.  If you happen to find yourself enjoying an exceptionally delicious bowl of instant ramen with a flavor that you can’t quite put your finger on, take a look at the following pictures.

Ting Yi, also known as Master Kong or Kang-shi-fu, holds over 50% of the instant ramen market and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that half of China consumes the company’s food products.  Since Ting Yi’s factory has come under scrutiny thanks to the shocking picture above, we’d like to give readers an overview of the Ting Yi instant ramen packaging process.

Here you see a machine designed to shape the instant noodles to fit in their circular bowl.

Here is a machine that automatically forms the ramen packages, cleverly named, “packaging machine.”  It’s hard to tell in the picture, but the packaging machine moves at an incredibly high speed, forming the printed paper into a usable bowl shape.

So far, the Ting Yi factory looks like any other place you’d see on an episode of How It’s Made.  But then things get a little crazy.

Here we have the high speed transfer lane, which brings the ramen from one area of the plant to another.  Something seems to be amiss…unless the ramen is supposed to be transferred to the floor.  We are under the impression that this is not just a mechanical mishap, but standard operating procedure at the Ting Yi ramen factory.

In the picture below, ramen bowls seem to continue to shoot down the runway above a scattered mess of open ramen containers and crumbled noodles.  Workers don’t seem to be making any attempt to stop the machine or clean up the mess.

It makes us wonder if ramen is so cheap to manufacture that Ting Yi can afford to dump half of its product onto the floor and throw it away.  Or maybe workers just not care and proclaim, “THREE SECOND RULE!“, dust off the ramen, and ship it to stores.  We’re hoping its the former, but we have a sneaking suspicion that the “ancient chinese secret” to Ting Yi’s ramen flavor is floor dust.

Whatever the circumstance, we’ll be inspecting our bowls of instant ramen more closely for stray hairs and dust bunnies from now on.

Source: YukawaNet