Key points
- Wonton Food, the world's largest fortune cookie maker, produces 5.5m a day, with annual output circling the globe two and a half times.
- Jennifer Lee traces the cookie to Japan's sujira senbei, brought to California by Japanese immigrants in the late 1800s.
- Restaurants give away cookies costing under 4 cents each, using them as loss leaders while Wonton Food earns fractions of a penny.
Inside the Zero-Margin Business of Fortune Cookies
The fortune cookie is a Japanese import that became an American Chinese restaurant ritual. Its economics are upside down because restaurants give it away, so the manufacturer survives on fractions of a penny and on selling restaurants other staples. The product's real value is the fortune, a mass-printed message that customers nonetheless treat as personal.
Takeaways
- Wonton Food dominates a zero-margin market. The Long Island City company makes 5.5m cookies a day and sells most under Golden Bowl to Chinese restaurants. Because restaurants give cookies away, profits can be fractions of a penny per cookie.
- Japanese immigrants brought the cookie to America. Jennifer Lee traced it to sujira senbei, or fortune crackers, sold in Japan in the mid-19th century. Japanese immigrants brought them to California in the late 1800s, and a leading theory has San Francisco bakery Benkyodo selling them around 1906.
- Chinese restaurants made the cookie an American ritual. Makoto Hagiwara sold them to Chinese restaurant owners catering to American tastes. Soldiers passing through San Francisco in World War Two spread the expectation, and 1960s immigration reform helped push Chinese restaurants past 45,000.
- Machines consolidated a family trade into giants. Hand folding topped out around 750 cookies an hour. Today's machines produce 8,000 an hour, wiping out most family-run factories and leaving a few giants, with Wonton Food the biggest.
- The fortunes are the labor-intensive part. Wonton Food's database holds more than 10,000 fortunes, and writers have mined quote books and social media. Fortunes must be positive because they arrive at the end of a meal and encourage customers to return.
- Lucky numbers turned cookies into lottery tickets. Wonton Food was the first to print six lucky numbers on the back. In 2005, 110 people won $19m in the Powerball lottery using them, prompting skeptical lottery officials to visit and review the process.
- The ritual endures because the message feels personal. The cookie has spread to Europe, South America, Africa and Australia, but a 1990s attempt to sell it in China failed because it was too American. A printed message feels personal even when it was printed 10,000 times.
Inside the Wonton Food factory
- 50-pound bags of ingredients go into stainless steel mixers for about 20 minutes.
- The batter is squirted onto greased metal slabs as thin pancakes and cooks.
- A proprietary machine cuts a preprinted fortune off a roll and folds it inside.
- A fan cools the cookie and another machine seals it in an air-filled wrapper.