The inspiration for his famous creation, the instant noodle, came to Momofuku Ando while he was watching people queue at a black-market stall selling hot ramen noodle soup as the Second World War drew to a close. Food was short, and Ando decided that “peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat”. The sentiment would become his company’s motto.

Ando was born into a wealthy family in the city of Chiayi in Taiwan in 1910, when the island was under Japanese colonial rule. His first business venture was a trading company in Taipei, before he moved to Japan at the age of 23, to study economics at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.

While still a student, he set up a clothing company in nearby Osaka. The business failed, and Ando went bankrupt. But his entrepreneurial instincts were undimmed and, aware of the problems the ordinary Japanese were experiencing in feeding themselves, Ando, having avoided military service, set out to find a way of producing food cheaply on a huge scale. In 1948 he founded what was to become one of Japan’s biggest companies, Nissin Food Products.

The family-run company at first produced only salt, but Ando worked on a process of drying noodles in a small laboratory in his garden. In the end, however, it was not in his makeshift production plant but at the dinner table that he found his solution. After watching his wife make tempura — deep fried fish and vegetables — Ando realised that hot oil was the key to drying out a noodle. This breakthrough led to his launching the world’s first instant noodle, the Chicken Ramen, in 1958.

Initially it was considered a novelty or a luxury item, as fresh noodles sold at a fraction of the price. But Ando was convinced that the convenience of his concept would help it sell and soon instant noodles were favourites, downed by ranks of workers at their desks, popular with students and men whose jobs forced them to live away from home cooking.

Spurred on by this success, Nissin launched the first Cup Noodle in 1971. The use of a polystyrene pot, which could hold and insulate boiling water, meant that Nissin came to dominate the instant noodle industry. The Cup Noodle design remains almost identical today.

Amid all the success, Ando also found that some products were not meant for the instant market, including a failed experiment with instant rice that is reported to have cost £15 million. Nevertheless, Nissin now sells 85 billion instant noodle products a year in 70 countries.

Ando’s fondest achievement was one of his most recent. In 2005 Nissin developed Space Ram, a vacuum-packed Cup Noodle designed for the Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, to take on his mission aboard the US space shuttle Discovery.

As Nissin became a multi- billion-dollar empire, Ando appeared in advertisements and attending promotional events. He was chairman of the International Ramen Manufacturers’ Association, and in 1964 founded the Instant Food Industry Association, which introduced guidelines for quality and fair competition.

In 1999 Ando opened the Instant Ramen Museum in his home city of Ikeda, near Osaka, and last year he unveiled plans to host the World Ramen Summit, a conference on instant noodles, in Osaka.

He retired from his position as Nissin’s chairman in 2005, appointing his son, Koki, as president. Even in retirement, however, Ando remained active and spoke at this year’s Nissin new year ceremony.

He is survived by his wife, Masako, two sons and a daughter.

Momofuku Ando, inventor and businessman, was born on March 5, 1910. He died on January 5, 2007, aged 96