New York Press
September 21, 2004

GABRIELLA GERSHENSON

 

I MEET DERRICK WONG, vice president of sales and marketing for Wonton Food Inc., and Richard Leung, a salesperson, in front of an anonymous-looking Queens warehouse. Though Wong is diminutive and Leung is bullish, they both wear polo shirts with chinos. Through the warehouse doors, there are boxes as far as the eye can see, stacked in pallets from the floor to the 30-foot ceiling, being transferred from place to place by an unsmiling carrier via forklift. There must have been thousands of boxes in this 9500-square-foot space. What is more astounding than sheer volume is the contents: fortune cookies.

For the believers among us, contemplating all of those fortunes in all of those boxes presents a conundrum. It's difficult enough at a Chinese restaurant to try to discern "which one is meant for me," but in the presence of millions of fortunes, the question takes on greater, existential proportions.

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. This Queens facility produces cookies 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just trying to keep up with current demand—according to Leung, there has been significant growth of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. in recent years. As astonishing as it may seem, these guys produce and move four million cookies every day.

"This whole thing could only last us one and a half days," says Leung, motioning to the towers of cookies in our midst. "If a trailer doesn't come for one day, we're in trouble."

The dusty interior of the Golden Bowl offices resembles some kind of social club—dirty linoleum, fake wooden desks, garishly colored Chinese calendars, chimes and basketball posters. For Wong, a mild-mannered man in his thirties, this is a family business. His uncle started Wonton Food Inc. as a noodle company and Asian dry-goods importer in 1973 on East Broadway in Manhattan. The business moved long ago—the noodle manufacturing plant is now in Brooklyn—and the old site on 187 E. Broadway is now their cash-and-carry store.

In 1982, Wong's family, led by father Foo Kam, immigrated to the States from the Guong Zhou region of Southern China and joined his brother's business. In 1983, Wonton entered the cookie racket when it took over a small factory in Chinatown, moving its operation to Queens by 1984. Since the first 1000-square-foot factory, the size has increased almost tenfold. Growth is due in large part to the work of Foo Kam and a team of designers that managed to build equipment that dramatically increased the volume of cookie production. The original factory's machinery was designed in such a way that only one cookie could be made at a time. The newer mechanism, still in use, allows for row upon row of fortune cookies to be made simultaneously.

Golden Bowl's operation is entirely automated. 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. This entire process happens almost instantaneously. The cookies are made in four flavors: citrus; the East Coast favorite, vanilla; the West Coast favorite, chocolate; and fun fun fortune cookie, a novelty cookie that combines all three flavors. The idea for the citrus cookie, says Wong, came from the orange wedges served at the end of the meal in many Chinatown restaurants.

Wonton Food Corp. may have started as a Chinese business, but it has evolved into a Chinese American one, a distinction that Wong makes readily. Their main products—chow mein noodles, fortune cookies and a pre-assembled vegetable mixture for egg rolls—are all vaguely Chinese foodstuffs that cater to the American market. (Wonton even supplies noodles for the military's MRE meals—"Before we were going to Iraq, there was an increase in the order, and we got a letter from the government saying that no matter what, they needed us to be able to fill it," says Leung.)

While the beginnings of fortune cookies can be traced back to 14th-century China as a clandestine form of communication—Chinese soldiers transferred secret messages via moon cakes—the likelier origins were American. In 1918, David Jung, a noodle manufacturer in Los Angeles, handed out cookies that contained uplifting messages as a promotional gimmick. To this day the tradition persists. Golden Bowl has more than 400 distributors, selling their cookies all over the U.S., in Puerto Rico, Canada and Europe.

"In the U.S.," says Wong, in faintly accented English, "People look for the cookie after the bill, and they ask for the cookie if they don't get it."

In 1995, Golden Bowl tried—and failed—to sell fortune cookies in China.

So, where do the fortunes come from? As one might suspect, Golden Bowl writes their own and hires freelancers to help them. Their criteria? "Basically it's got to be happy," says Leung. "It's got to have some kind of meaning to it. Most importantly it cannot be offensive."

Some examples of Golden Bowl's handiwork:

Nothing gets in the way of your vision of yourself in the future.

Change is happening in your life, so go with the flow!

You will be sharing great news with all the people you love.

All the effort you are making will ultimately pay off.

You will soon discover how fortunate you truly are.

In more fortune-cookie history, Wong claims that theirs is the first company to print lucky numbers on the backs of fortunes, and one of the first to feature "Learn Chinese." Golden Bowl also does personalized fortunes and advertisements. When asked how that works, Leung explains, "On the back we'll have a message that says you'll meet a dark and handsome stranger and so on and so forth," says Leung, "and on the back we'll have [a website]."

The engineers at Golden Bowl also designed and built their own fortune presses, which print 80 messages at a time (40 plates, one message on each side) in food-grade ink, producing hulking scrolls of fortunes chubbier than paper towel rolls.

"There are not a lot of factories like this as far as fortune cookies go," says Wong.