Why you can't just "add salt" to lower sodium ramen and expect it to taste the same?

This doesn't get talked about enough, but sodium is WAY more than just salt.

See, sodium's demonized a lot, but it's actually not only a necessary nutrient...

It's actually what your body uses to make your muscles move, and even helps keep you hydrated!

All those fancy "hydration packs" and electrolyte things out there? The primary ingredient in them is none other than SALT.

But, table salt, also known as Sodium Chloride(remember this, it's important), isn't the only contributor to sodium. After all, once you break it down, it's a combination of both Sodium and Chloride, of which Chloride gets used in things like your stomach acid, which is hydrochloric acid, the "chloric" in there being chloride!

Meat, mushrooms, and plenty of plant ingredients naturally contain sodium too. So when we add those ingredients to a flavor, their sodium comes with them.

That means reducing sodium in our flavors isn't as simple as just "just reduce the salt."

In many of our flavors, there's barely any added salt, in the form of just pure Sodium Chloride, table salt. Rather, the sodium comes from all the real, dehydrated ingredients we use!

Some ingredients, like soy sauce and miso, use salt in how they're made. They bring much more than just salinity, and have exponentially synergistic effects that hugely increase the savory, tasty flavors that exist in ramen. Other ingredients, like kombu seaweed, also just naturally contain a bunch of sodium in them too.

That means when working within a sodium limit, I'm not just restricted on adding less salt-- I'm restricted on using fewer ingredients in general, and can't use ingredient synergies to create a better depth of flavor!

Right now, at 33% DV of sodium on the vegan white miso, soy sauce chicken, and garlic pork tonkotsu flavors, it sometimes feels like we're nerfing ourselves.

It's not low enough sodium for people on low sodium diets to want it...

But it's also low enough that I'm very restricted on the ingredients I can use. No additional salt is used, for instance, in the roasted soy sauce chicken and vegan white miso, of which all the sodium levels come strictly from the miso and soy sauce and other ingredients used in it.

We're getting more people saying "oh it's bland" and things like that, which, for me, is frustrating to see, because I know that I can make the flavor better. They also could add more salt themselves, which would help, but, for the reasons stated above, it just wouldn't be the same as if we were to develop the recipe with higher sodium levels.

The survey's purpose is to see, generally speaking, how many people care about one way or the other.

The idea here is that if we have a strong enough split, and it's not a tiny chunk one way or the other, we're going to do what we can to commit to having a truly lower sodium line, at 20% DV, or roughly 460mg for the full packet, as well as increasing the flavor oomph of the current flavors.

Anyway, hope you learned a bit more about sodium here!

-Tim, Founder Vite