Momofuku Ando, a Japanese businessman whose invention of instant noodles quickly grew to billions of servings annually around the world, died Friday of heart failure in an Osaka-area hospital. He was 96.

Ando’s entrepreneurial genius was to shuck off centuries of tradition and realize that noodles did not necessarily have to be cooked fresh. After tinkering for a year in his backyard shed, he discovered that noodles could be dried, packaged and rehydrated in a bowl of boiling water in just three minutes.

His concoction of flour, palm oil and MSG created a new food that appealed to tastes across Asia and in the United States. Ando began exporting instant ramen into the U.S. in 1970 and a year later created Cup Noodle — noodles that could be sold and prepared in the same container — inspired by the way American consumers plopped their noodles into a cup and ate them with a fork.

His small Osaka firm, Nissin Foods Co., quickly grew into a $3 billion multinational corporation with 29 subsidiaries in 11 countries. Worldwide, the industry sold 85 billion packages in 2005.

As recounted in his 2002 autobiography, “How I Invented Magic Noodles,” Ando’s eureka moment occurred in 1957, when he noticed a long line of customers waiting for service outside a noodle shop. A year later he introduced what was first called “Chicken Ramen.” He began mass production after Japanese customers proved they were prepared to defy the sneering of Japan’s traditional udon and soba noodle makers. At first it was a luxury dish, costing up to six times more than fresh noodles.

Under Ando, who remained chairman until 2005, Nissin maintained its market leadership in Japan with a steady stream of new products ranging from picante shrimp to Cajun chicken. In 2005, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi chowed down in the space shuttle Discovery on a bowl of Nissin’s Space Ram, whose vacuum-sealed packet was developed with Japan’s space agency.

The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum opened in 1999 in Ikeda City in western Japan commemorating his inventions.

Born in 1910 to Taiwanese parents, he worked in his grandparent’s fabric store as a youngster and went into a variety of businesses, including selling salt, magic-lantern projectors and prefabricated houses and running a school. After the war, he was prosecuted for tax evasion and went bankrupt. But his invention of ramen noodles came in time to take advantage of a sudden expansion of Japanese supermarkets and convenience-oriented consumerism. Most observers credit the company’s creatively adventurous TV ads with much of its success in holding market share, including one starring Arnold Schwarzenegger swinging two heavy kettles over his head.