Vite Ramen: A Deeper Look Into How a Nutritious Ramen Company is Supporting the Esports Scene
“Our main goal is to hopefully one day be the official ramen of esports…We want to be a form of support for players who don’t live in team houses, who don’t have in-house chefs that some teams have.”
Esports Advocates is a series of interviews with a variety of companies and organizations who are supporting the grassroots competitive gaming scene. Learn more about what they do and what esports means to them.
As the ultimate convenience food to broke students and busy working adults, instant ramen has proven to be one of the most popular meal options anywhere. Google the words “instant ramen” and you’ll be bombarded with articles of its detrimental health effects and lack of nutritional value. Vite Ramen has taken it upon themselves to create a high protein instant noodle that not only offers 25% of all nutrients as well as vitamins and minerals you need in a day but also retains all the delicious flavours of typical instant ramen.
As individuals who adore gaming, the Vite Kitchen’s team has been supporting the Overwatch community by providing noodles and sponsorships to Overwatch teams like Revival and Third Impact as well as content creators in the field. This week, the Insights.gg team had the pleasure of meeting up with Tim, the CEO and co founder, and James, the outreach lead, from Vite Kitchens to learn more about their product and their involvement as sponsors in various industries they are passionate about, such as esports and parkour.
Q: Can you tell us about Vite Ramen?
[Tim] We’re Vite Kitchens and we produce Vite Ramen, which is the world’s first nutritionally complete non shake meal. There have been products like Soylent fuel, Super Body Fuel, but none of them have been in an actual food format. It’s always been shakes or some kind of flavored liquid, which usually have sweet flavours. So Vite Ramen took it two steps further and not only made a savory option, but we chose a product that lots of people eat but view as unhealthy, ramen. We are very passionate about our product so every time we see a way that we can make our product more nutritious, we upgrade our ramen so it can be the best version of a healthy ramen.
[Tim] We came up with the idea for Vite Ramen because I used to eat a lot of instant ramen when I was playing on the Aggie Gaming Overwatch team at UC Davis. Between scrims, VOD reviews and classes, I was mostly eating instant ramen and had to force myself to eat lots of eggs and vegetables in order to get my nutrition. That’s when I decided I wanted to make a healthy ramen. A lot of members of the Vite Ramen team come from collegiate Overwatch esports. We watched Overwatch League matches and followed the Tier 2 scene way before we started Vite Ramen, and we also currently hold the speed run record for paying out a T2 tournament at 27.16 seconds! We sponsor a ton of teams and content creators, like Revival, and continue to do everything we can to help out the T2/T3 Overwatch esports scene! As a company, we play a lot of video games and that’s why we put so much into supporting esports whenever we can
[James] When I transferred to UC Davis, I actually founded Aggie Gaming club. Originally, UC Davis only had one gaming club, and it was for League of Legends. At the time, I was very into Overwatch and so I founded Aggie Gaming as a game agnostic club as opposed to having a club that focused only on one game. It was through Aggie Gaming that I met Tim, and it was how I was able to join the Vite Ramen team. Gaming is a passion at Vite Ramen and it’s the reason why we as a company, put so much into supporting esports. We love playing and watching esports on all levels.
Q: What motivated you guys to invest in the esports industry or work with esports teams? What made you see the value?
[Tim] I unfortunately got to college a little too late and I think if I were currently 18, I would definitely be trying to make it as an esports player. However as a boomer, my reaction time can’t compare to all these talented younger players. I met Eris, our COO, through playing MechWarrior online and we would go raid planets. We also played CS:GO and Overwatch and would go to Oakland to watch ASCO events. esports was just very close to our hearts. Even now, our team plays Valorant all the time and we compete for fun. We want to support the esports scene as much as we can. We actually got into esports when we were looking to do more YouTube marketing. I was watching a lot of Akshon Esports and realized that we could do YouTube marketing by offering sponsorships to content creators that we like, so we reached out to Akshon and sponsored a couple of videos.
Q: Is Esports the main industry in which you guys do sponsorships for or are there other industries that you are passionate about supporting?
[James] We’ve actually expanded our sponsorship reach outside of esports as well. A couple of people in the company, Tim, his brother Tom, are into parkour. Tom specifically is pretty hard into it. So we’ve actually been sponsoring some prominent parkour members of the scene.
[Tim] Actually, now that I think about it, I think half of the staff at Vite Ramen know each other through parkour. Everyone is super skilled, I’m probably the least skilled one out of all of them.
[James] We like to be a part of communities that are kind of grassroots, and ones that we ourselves are part of. Just so that we don’t have the feeling of being an outsider looking into a community, we want to not only be a part of the community as well as supporting it. We have sponsored individuals in esports, parkour, Star Wars, Halo, and even bodybuilding. Tim is a Halo player as well. We don’t have specific industries or communities that we sponsor. We just love it when the relationships feel genuine and the person we’re sponsoring actually likes our product and we like their work. It’s a mutual benefit kind of thing.
Q. What type of sponsorships does you team generally offer?
[James] Typically, we offer whatever best suits their needs. As a ramen company, we prefer to offer our noodles as means to help feed their teams or players. Whoever needs food, we’re here to support them and their health. It does really depend on the specific team or individual. Occasionally we can offer financial assistance but we primarily focus on providing ramen.
[Tim] To follow up on that, we tend to be more flexible in our contracts because we are really more about helping rather than a straight contract of exchanging a specific amount of money or product for a specific piece of marketing content. So yeah, we are very flexible with our sponsorships and it’s dependent on the organizations needs instead of straight up contracts.
Q. What do you look for when you are deciding who to sponsor?
[James] Before we decide on a contract, or agree to any type of partnership we like to see what an organization is like by meeting their people. We want to see whether they are genuine, we want to see passion and not just partnerships for the sake of business. Our goal is to collaborate with individuals or organizations that like and believe in our product. We aren’t here just to pump money into the scene.
Q. What are your upcoming plans in esports?
[James] Our main goal is to hopefully one day be the official ramen of esports. So to reach that goal, we’ll hopefully be able to become a ramen supplier for professional teams. We want to be a form of support for players who don’t live in team houses, who don’t have in-house chefs that some teams have. We can be an option for organizations to show that they care about the health and performance of their players.
Q. Are there any new exciting upcoming products from Vite Ramen?
[Tim] I guess we can reveal it here, some people have already figured it out and we’ve been teasing at it. We are coming out with a beef flavor, it’s a Grilled Ribeye Beef Flavor, and it’s my personal favorite. It’s currently being blended and made right now. The way I would describe it is that it tastes like a good cast iron grilled steak somehow placed into a bowl of ramen. I’m really excited for people to try that flavor. We’re developing some other new flavors but I’m going to hold off on talking about those since they are still subject to change. All I will say is that we have really cool flavors down the line that we plan on releasing soon!
Q. Do you feel like you have to sacrifice the flavour of instant ramen when elevating its nutritional value?
[Tim] Developing the flavor of Vite Ramen to be as close to, or better than, instant ramen is definitely a challenge, as it’s an extremely complex process to be able to balance everything that we want. Being a nutritionally complete food, every single ingredient we change will have strong effects on its nutrition. If we remove some onion powder and add in some chicken, then we’ll have removed some carbs, added some protein, removed some selenium, added some potassium, etc. Not only that, but we currently have our sodium locked at 25% of your daily value, just like the other ingredients, which means we have to be extraordinarily careful with the sodium content of ingredients as well. This is compounded with how we construct our broths, with the first ingredient in our chicken and pork flavors being real dehydrated chicken and real dehydrated pork, instead of salt and sugar with flavorings.
[Tim] We’re tackling many, many issues at once that no one else in the industry has wanted to try — Going lower sodium, higher protein, every single vitamin and mineral, and using high quality ingredients all at the same time, and making sure every single one of those vitamins and minerals are highly bioavailable and actually able to absorb into your body. This means we can’t use cheap, bad vitamins and minerals like magnesium oxide, instead opting for high quality, absorbable nutrients instead. And honestly, vitamins and minerals taste terrible by themselves, so that’s another flavor challenge we have to overcome. Anyone who’s had v1.0 to v1.1 to v1.1.1 to v1.2 knows that we’ve made massive leaps and bounds in understanding how to develop the flavor into what we have today, and we’re still learning and still improving it every single day.
[Tim] In the end, I would say we’ve been pretty successful at making it the way we want. You can see the progression especially in our newest flavor to come out, Sichuan Chili Edition, and you’ll see an even bigger jump in our yet unreleased, unannounced flavor, Grilled Ribeye Beef(special leak for those of you reading this). As for the future? We’ll just keep making it better and better and better as we learn more!
To learn more about Vite Ramen and the great things they’re doing for the community, be sure to follow them on Twitter.
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