From Laboratory to Mass Production

In Japan, Professor Ikeda is regarded as one of the country’s ten most distinguished inventors. This is not actually because of his identification of glutamate as the basis of umami, but rather because he immediately grasped its technological and commercial potentials. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for what was to become one of the world’s largest multinational industrial enterprises within the food sector, namely, the creation of the company Ajinomoto.

Despite its brevity, Ikeda’s original article from 1909 incorporated many of the elements required for the successful technology transfer of his discovery. He noted that it would be expensive to extract pure MSG from seaweeds, but this was probably not necessary if its end-use was as a flavor enhancer. Here it would often be combined with other ingredients, which would not spoil the taste of the glutamate and might even add to the nutritional value of the product. Ikeda also wrote that it should be possible to use industrial hydrolysis to mass-produce glutamate from plant matter, which is rich in proteins. This process breaks down the proteins, releasing their glutamic acid and glutamate contents. Ikeda modestly disclosed in the article that he had already taken out a patent on his discovery one year earlier.