We're totally aware that our ramen is higher priced than normal, but for good reason. It's well known in the food world that the cheaper your product is, the better your sales will be. Unfortunately, fighting for the bottom dollar often means that the employees who make the food pay the cost: minimum wage, poor working hours and no consideration for mental health or overall/general employee well-being.
Being from a culinary background, we’re intimately familiar with the kind of exploitation that workers can be subject to, and the kind of poverty people can experience even while working twelve hour days. The first step to combating this kind of exploitation is to set up business models that incorporate the negative externalities directly into the price, rather than perpetuate the unsustainable business models that currently exist.
We're putting our money where our mouth is and paying all of our employees a living wage no matter what position they work, giving healthy amounts of PTO and with no questions asked days off for mental health. It's extremely important to us that our employees are treated fairly and that our ramen isn't made at the expense of the people who make it.
Would we be able to make the product cheaper through outsourcing and sell more by decreasing the cost? Yeah, absolutely! But we're not about that. We're not in this to make the biggest profit (in fact, our profit margins are so low we can't afford to sell in supermarkets, which should give you an idea). Factor in the material costs for all the things like quinoa and protein for a healthier ramen and being made in the USA and that's how we set our costs.
In the end, we just want to make the best ramen possible, have an excuse to eat ramen every day, and be proud of what we're doing and the employees who make it happen. And when it comes down to it, each of our meals is still less than the cost of a fast food meal! :)