The Japanese Cookie That Made Chinese Fortunes
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 11 Dec, 2025

The Chinese American family behind Wonton Foods enjoys one of the best fortunes to emerge from those often enigmatic words embedded in the millions of wontons cracked open each day after Chinese restaurant meals.

When I was 11 my dad took us to a Chinese restaurant for an early dinner before my brother’s little league game.  The meal ended like most American Chinese meals: with a fortune cookie for each of us.

The three of us delighted in my brother’s fortune, which predicted that he would soon be stepping up to conquer a major challenge.

Wonton Food Inc's former Chief Fortune Writer Donald Lau

It was just a few hours later that he would make a diving catch in the bottom of the 9th inning to win the baseball game for his team. For the first time, his coach gave him the game ball.

On the way home we stopped to buy a frame for the baseball. When my dad but the ball in the frame, he included the fortune with it.

It’s been over 20 years since that night and the framed baseball and fortune still sit on a shelf in our family living room. 

I caught a glimpse of it while I was home for a visit last month and I started thinking about that fortune.

Was there actual mysticism at play?

Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, I thought.  Perhaps the cookie’s encouragement is what led my brother to do something bold.

I thought about the millions of people who have likely asked the same questions after their fortunes did or didn’t come true.

Who was even writing these things?

Jimmy Kimmel and sidekick Guillermo get a tour of Wonton's fortune writing room from Head Writer James Wong

The Origin

Before I could get to the bottom of people assigning us our fates I needed a little more information

The history of the fortune cookie is itself fascinating.  Much like say orange chicken, it is not native to Mainland China.

In fact the earliest known version of a fortune cookie originated in Kyoto, Japan. 

Part of the committee that decides what fortunes are chosen to appear in Wonton's cookies

At the dawn of the 20th century Japanese immigrants in the US began opening Chinese restaurants across California because their own cuisine was seen as too exotic.  They brought a taste of their own culture — the fortune cookie — to these restaurants.

But it wasn’t long before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in many of those Japanese restaurant owners being thrown into internment camps or getting deported. 

According to Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, from that point on fortune cookies “mysteriously jumped from being basically something that was clearly defined as Japanese to something that is Chinese.”

The attack on Pearl Harbors was quickly followed by World War II, which meant an increase in soldiers passing through California and therefore the spread of fortune cookies throughout the country. 

The Industry Leader

Nearly any attempt to gather information on fortune cookies will lead you to the same place: Wonton Food Inc. 

Wonton is effectively the home of the fortune cookie. They single-handedly produce about five and a half million fortune cookies per day.

Whether you’re dining at Panda Express or a local hole in the wall joint, the odds are that the fortune cookie that adds a sweet and prophetic endcap to your meal was made by Wonton. 

Given the stronghold that Wonton Foods has on the business it’s easy to think of them as a faceless corporation not unlike a Wal-Mart or a McDonald’s.

But they began as a truly modest operation.  

Chinese immigrant Ching Sun Wong who came here in the 1960s began his mom and pop noodle operation in a New York City factory basement in 1973. 

It didn’t take long for the noodle factory — which became a popular supplier to Asian New York City restaurants — to grow well-beyond a 10-employee operation and expand to other foods as well.  

When Wonton began manufacturing fortune cookies, they were far from the only game in town. But as with many successful businesses they simply eclipsed the competition.  

By comparison Golden Gate Fortune Cookies, founded in 1962 in San Francisco, produces about 10,000 cookies a day. 

While smaller companies like Golden Gates are no massive operation like Wonton’s they have found their own place in the market by offering a more artisanal hand-made product. 

Some other gourmet mom-and-pop fortune cookie shops offer the product in various flavors like chocolate and strawberry.

Today Wonton manufacturers over 1.5 billion fortune cookies a year. That’s enough fortunes nearly to circle the Earth twice if laid end to end along the equator.

The Writer

Eight years ago comedian Jimmy Kimmel visited Wonton's Queens headquarters for a segment on his late night show.  After checking out the physical production of the fortune cookies, Kimmel honed in on the fortune writing process.

“This is where people’s fates are decided?  In a cubicle?” Kimmel proclaimed after popping into the windowless fortune-writing office that might as well have been used for accounting or telemarketing.  

Kimmel was right.  There was something decidedly unsexy about the aesthetics of the setup.

But many a writer will tell you that those bland windowless rooms, drab as they may be, have been known to produce some of their best creative output.  Sometimes achieving full productivity — in writing and other work — requires one to forget about the beautiful outside world that they might otherwise be a part of. 

In the same way that Kimmel’s late night show employs a head writer, Wonton has long had a Chief Fortune Writer.

For nearly three decades, that position was held by Donald Lau, a former corporate banker who also served as Wonton’s Chief Financial Officer.

When Wonton subsumed the East Coast’s oldest and biggest producer of fortune cookies in the 1980s, Lau was tasked with sharpening up the existing database of a few hundred fortunes.  He claims to have gotten the job because his English was better than any of the other employees’.

As Chief Fortune writer, Lau would produce about 100 fortunes a year for about 30 years. But in 2017, citing “writer’s bloc,” he passed the reigns to James Wong, the nephew of Wonton’s founder. 

But neither Lau or Wong has ever ultimately had the final say. 

Any proposed fortune must be unanimously approved by a vetting committee.  If the committee depicted on Kimmel’s segment is standard, it is composed of eight members: four men and four women.

The Message

There are effectively three types of messages that a fortune cookie might contain: 

Predictive - “You will meet a new friend tomorrow.”

Humorous - “Don’t run for president, you’re not a good liar.”

Philosophical - “Failure is the mother of success.”

Inspirational - “You can achieve anything you set your mind to.”

I personally consider myself a traditionalist.  In my opinion, a fortune should tell you the future. I wouldn’t go to a fortune teller only to be told something I already know.  A fortune cookie should be no different.

But the goal of a fortune, as Lau once told Time Magazine, is for a customer to “Read it, maybe laugh, and leave the restaurant happy.”

Wonton decidedly fell well below that goal when they rolled out a crop of dark and biting fortunes in 2007.

“There may be a crisis looming, be ready for it,” read one. “Today is a disastrous day. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” declared another.

According to the head of Wonton’s marketing team, this particular batch was written by freelance fortune writers. 

This wasn’t the only setback Wonton has faced.  In the early 1900s they opened a factory in China, but the experiment was short-lived. The factory shut down just a few years later after fortune cookies failed to catch on in China. 

The Lucky Numbers

Another way that Wonton foods put their own unique fingerprint on the fortune cookie was the addition of “lucky numbers" to the little paper slip. 

The inclusion of these numbers were intended to serve as more than just a reason to buy a Powerball ticket — they represented a key tenet of Chinese culture.

Dating back thousands of years various schools of Chinese philosophy have held that numbers serve as more than simple quantities. They reflect balance, luck and cosmic order. 

Of course that hasn’t stopped people from using them to gamble.  There have even been various instances in which a sequence of numbers found in Wonton’s fortune cookies have made someone a literal fortune.

In 2005 Wonton received a visit from federal authorities after one particular sequence of fortune cookie numbers won 110 people about $19 million. 

The Lasting Impact

It’s hard to believe that the fortune cookie was popularized well under a century ago — within the lifetime of a swath of today’s population. 

Much more than a mere post-prandial treat, it has solidified its place in pop culture. 

For example the 2003 cult classic film Freaky Friday revolves around a mother and daughter switching places due to an enchanted fortune cookie that they’re served at a restaurant. 

A fortune may carry a different meaning in the eyes of the beholder.

In high school my friends would play a game where one would add the words “in bed” to the end of their fortune after reading it.

So one might read “You are about to experience major success… in bed.”

Anyone who believes that fortune cookies are meant to honor ancient philosophy might surely find such behavior offensive 

Then again if Wonton’s goal is for customers to “Read it, maybe laugh, and leave the restaurant happy" then they nailed it.