Here’s all the noteworthy noodle news for August 2025! There’s an interesting new pair of flavors available from Ramen Bae, some new products from Nissin that you might spot in your local supermarkets, and some troubling news about ordering noodles to the USA.
Read more: Noodle News Roundup: August 2025Ramen Bae Debuts New Mixes
Ramen Bae, one of my two favorite proprietors of instant noodle toppings, debuted a pair of new flavors this month. One of them was announced a while back, and they even held a contest on social media to decide on the name – it’s their mushroom-free mix, cleverly dubbed the No Fungus Among Us Mix. With so many people complaining about mushroom aversions and allergies to Ramen Bae, they created this mix to appeal to those folks. In the bag, you’ll find bok choy, fried shallot, garlic, cabbage, broccoli, carrot, pea, green onion, and corn. Sounds like a great mix! I most likely won’t be buying it to review since I don’t have much use for a mushroom-free mix, but it’s a nice alternative to their other mixes.
The other new mix was more of a surprise. The original Beef Mix was a limited-batch offering and is currently sold out, but there’s a new beef mix in town that is much more appealing to me: Ramen Bae’s Fried Shallot Beef Mix. This mix contains real freeze-dried beef, fried shallot, cabbage, carrot, shiitake mushroom, green onion, and bok choy. The thing that kept me from buying the original Beef Mix was the inclusion of dried egg in it, an ingredient I intensely disliked in their Spicy Garlic Mix. But now, this new mix is not only egg-free, but it also has those awesome fried shallot pieces in the bag! I’ll probably be doing a review of this one for the website the next time they have a sale.
Nissin Debuts New Top Ramen and Cup Noodles in the US Market
Nissin releases new flavors in Japan pretty much every month or every other month, but here in the USA, we aren’t quite so lucky to get new flavors as often. This past month, though, my local grocery store started stocking some neat new flavors: Cup Noodles Protein and Top Ramen HotPot Fusions.
The Cup Noodles Protein flavors (Rich & Savory Chicken, Hot & Spicy Chicken, and Rich & Savory Beef) are infused with bone broth powder in the broth mix, giving you 16g of protein per cup. By the time you read this, I’ll have already published reviews on those three Cup Noodles Protein varieties.
The Top Ramen HotPot Fusions are specific takes on popular Asian soup recipes: Korean Spicy Beef, Thai Coconut Curry Chicken, and Japanese Garlic Tonkotsu Pork. I have all three of these in hand and will be reviewing them soon, but I can tell you this up front: the serving sizes are enormous, they’ve got a crazy amount of sodium per bowl (because they’re technically two servings each), and I have it on very good authority from one of my fellow ramen reviewers that the Japanese Tonkotsu variety is top-tier. From an ingredients perspective, all three look very promising to me. I’ll have my official reviews published as soon as I work my way up to them.
International Shipping to the USA
Back in my April news post, I talked about the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on American businesses, specifically companies in the instant noodle space who rely on ingredients and products from overseas. Over the past week, the landscape for international shipping to the US has shifted even more dramatically. Following the Trump administration’s executive order titled “Termination of De Minimis Treatment for All Countries”, postal authorities in more than thirty countries have suspended parcel services to the United States. Japan Post formally announced the halt on August 25, and soon after, one of the first major international instant noodle sellers, instantramenshop.com, alerted customers via Reddit and an announcement on their website that they would no longer be able to ship to the US. South Korea’s postal service followed suit, and other affected countries include India, Mexico, and a wide swath of Europe. For noodle fans like me who love buying imports, the ripple effects are going to be profound.
To understand why this is happening, it’s important to know what the “de minimis” rule was, because I didn’t really know too much about it prior to all this happening – I just ordered my noodles in blissful ignorance. For years, US Customs allowed imports under $800 in value to enter without duties, tariffs, or the heavy paperwork that accompanies commercial shipments. It’s how small packages of snacks, clothes, or instant noodles (my main concern here, of course) were able to cross borders to individual consumers and small reseller businesses without being priced out by bureaucracy. The administration has justified ending the policy by arguing that de minimis treatment was being abused, particularly by Chinese e-commerce giants, to undercut US businesses and bypass tariffs. By removing the exemption entirely, the stated goal is to close that loophole. And look, I completely understand that there is a good argument for Temu and Shein being regulated a bit more if you have a particular dislike for the current state of global commerce, but as is often the case with this administration, there’s no nuance to this blanket removal of the de minimis rule.
For those of us who buy instant noodles from abroad, this is a pretty major impact. Japan and South Korea, two of the biggest sources of premium instant ramen and specialty snacks for those of us who love such things, have both suspended postal shipments to the US. India has also pulled back, meaning if you ordered any import-only flavors of Maggi noodles directly from India, you’re not going to be getting them anytime soon. Even if private couriers eventually step in, which I have yet to observe but will probably come eventually if this isn’t repealed or rethought, costs will skyrocket and options will shrink. In practical terms, this means that limited-edition ramen releases and import-only noodle varieties from brands without an American store presence will now be functionally out of reach for American consumers. What once was as simple as ordering a couple boxes online is now suddenly a logistical and financial headache. I have a ton of site reviews planned for ramen I’ve ordered from japanese-snacks-republic.com and mykmarket.com, and was planning on ordering more before all this started, so I’m personally impacted
And this isn’t just about noodles. The end of de minimis hits anyone who depends on affordable international shipping, whether for food, books, collectibles, tech, or just plain old tchotchkes. Even if you’re politically neutral, it’s hard to ignore how disruptive this is to ordinary people who have nothing to do with trade disputes. Instead of targeting bad actors or tightening rules on large-scale importers, this blanket policy shuts the door on everyday buyers. One of my friends pointed out that if you’re ordering something from overseas that doesn’t exist in America, like a limited-edition strawberry ramyun for example, then your purchase is in no way taking away business from an American company… so why are all international purchases being punished in the same way? In the long run, this decision leaves Americans with fewer choices, higher prices, and less cultural exchange, all over a loophole that could have been addressed way more precisely.
