Who Invented The Fortune Cookie? And have you ever had one come true?

Believe It or Not! the tasty fortune cookies that come with your Chinese take-out weren’t invented in China. The concept for the tiny after-dinner desserts actually originated in Japan and spread to North America at the turn of the century!

In the early 1900s, Japanese immigrants in San Francisco and Los Angeles, made fortune cookies at their bakeries. A few local Chinese restaurants lacked desserts on their menu, so they started procuring the Japanese cookies to sell to their own customers. It’s believed the cookies were first produced sometime between 1907 and 1914.

In the ‘60s, a man named Edward Louie founded Lotus Fortune in San Francisco and created an automatic fortune cookie machine. Wonton Food Inc., based in Queens, N.Y., now produces an estimated 4.5 million fortune cookies every day.

Wonton employs a Fortune Writer to come up with new fortunes each year. Back in the day fortune cookies typically resembled horoscopes, i.e., “You will be successful.” They evolved and these days often feature sayings that make people happy. Not everyone is happy with the words of wisdom as an example, a woman criticized Wonton after her husband opened a fortune that suggested he would find love on his next business trip…..Ed

Source: Noelle Talmon,Ripley’s / Photo:Pexels