This man comes up with the messages in fortune cookies
‘A stranger becomes a good friend’ or ‘Hard work brings success closer’ – the kind of wisdom that comes out of your fortune cookie when you’ve eaten at a Chinese-Indonesian restaurant. Who comes up with those messages? Kevin Chan, director of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, for example. ‘I’ve written at least a thousand of them,’ he says.
Every day, 15,000 cookies roll off the production line at Kevin Chan’s cookie factory. They are folded by hand, and the notes containing the fortunes are also inserted by employees, not by a machine. Factory director Chan is the person who comes up with the messages in the cookies. ‘I listen carefully to the people around me,’ he tells culinary magazine Saveur. ‘That’s where I get my inspiration.’
Don’t give up
His favorite messages have something to do with perseverance, such as ‘Never give up’. ‘Another one I really like is: Use your talents – that’s what they’re intended for. And something I’d like to tell people in the current political situation as well: A bad peace is better than a good wall.’
Surprise!
Chan took over the factory from his mother Nancy, who started it in 1962. He supplies cookies to restaurants in the San Francisco area. Which fortune ends up in which cookie is determined by chance, he explains. ‘They’re all printed on little slips of paper, and those slips are randomly put into the cookies. I want it to remain a surprise, even for me.’
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Source: Saveur
