" 'You have no fortune.' I didn't need a cookie to tell me that."
- Carrie, "Sex and the City" television series
It's always been fun to me to stumble across something I didn't know about some mundane item from everyday life. Tonight while checking out the interesting Arts and Letters Daily website, I was entertained by this Gabriella Gershenson story about Chinese fortune cookies.
Have you ever wondered how the custom of serving a fortune cookie after a Chinese meal came to be? Have you wondered how they're made? Where they come from? Who invented them? Well, wonder no more. Ms. Gershenson has done the research for us in this NY Press.com report:
"Next time you eat Chinese, pay attention to the cookie wrapper. You may very well find that the brand is Golden Bowl, a division of Brooklyn-based Wonton Food Inc., the largest producer of fortune cookies on the East Coast, and possibly in the country...As astonishing as it may seem, these guys produce and move four million cookies every day."
So many are produced and the company's storage space is so small that if their transport failed to show up for just one day, they wouldn't have a place to put all their cookies.
Wonton is a family business that was founded in 1973 and has grown steadily as new markets have been captured in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada and Europe. For whatever reason, they have been unable to develop a market for their cookies in China. Go figure.
Their original 1,000 square foot building has expanded almost ten-fold, and cookies once made one-at-a time now flow by the thousands out of a completely automated process:
"A batter of mostly flour, eggs and sugar is mixed upstairs and transported through a pipe into the main facility, which feeds a machine that releases drops of batter onto heated plates on which the cookies bake like pancakes. A fortune is deposited onto the still-soft cookie disk that is then folded mechanically into its claw-like shape. The entire process happens almost instantaneously."
Surprisingly, many of the fortunes that are baked into the cookies are written by Golden Bowl employees.
The company management claims to be the creator of innovations such as lucky lotto numbers, personalized fortunes and website advertising. These achievements should earn them the distinction of being a fortune cookie business that's on the cutting edge, I would think.
Next time you're in a Chinese restaurant and the server brings you a fortune cookie, take a minute and tell him what you've learned at this post. I bet he'll be impressed.
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