Fortune cookie factory
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800 S Weller St International District
206 / 623-0801 website
-closed Sunday
-credit cards not accepted
-take-out only
Interview with company president, Tim Louie
It’s almost impossible to get lost looking for the Tsue Chong fortune cookie factory. Even from blocks away the perfume of vanilla or almond extract will lead you by the nose.
Unless you happen to work there.
“All my visitors and friends say, Ah! It smells so good in here! I say, I don't smell anything! What are you guys talking about? You know, but, I think I'm just numb to that.”
Tim Louie is the president of Tsue Chong Company.
Despite the sweet smells, Tsue Chong began as a noodle factory, and still makes a wide variety of noodles and wrappers:
“Our company started with my great-grandfather, Gar Hip Louie, back in 1917. And as an early Chinese immigrant he was here and just doing labor work--came over on a ship--and realized there was no local noodle factory and as you know one of the primary dietary items is rice and noodles. So he saw a business opportunity back in 1917 and that is how the business started.
“Six years after my great-grandfather started the business, his son--my grandfather--Fat Yuen Louie, took over and operated the noodle factory.
"’Tsue Chong’ means, in Chinese, ‘gather prosperity’ and we manufacture under the Rose Brand, our logo. It was just very creative how my grandfather created that. In his free time he liked to grow roses. At first as a young child I thought ‘Rose’ was my grandma’s name, that he would do the brand name after my grandmother, but no, it was because he liked to grow red roses in the garden. And that's how we adopted Rose Brand.
“How we got started on the fortune cookies is: fortune cookie is actually, according to my information that I’ve researched, is more of an American invented product, originating in the Bay Area, San Francisco, around the mid-1950s. So when my grandmother heard of that concept, relatively new, since we were already distributing noodles to the restaurants she decided that it would be a good idea to manufacture fortune cookies and sell it along with our noodles. And that is how we got started in our fortune cookie production.”
To move into cookies Tsue Chong had to invest in new supplies and technology:
“There was no overlap at all; fortune cookies are much different than noodles. Total different sets of ingredients. Even the flour we have to use, we have to use a baking pastry flour. And I mentioned San Francisco; so our first pieces of fortune cookie baking equipment was from San Francisco.
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| "unfortunate" cookies and fortune cookies |
Tsue Chong has always been in Chinatown, and the current building is the company’s third, built in 1992. The fortune cookies are made on the top floor. Tours are available, but only to school and youth groups, and only by appointment.
“Some of the unique things about us as a fortune cookie factory, we have the famous ‘unfortunate’ cookies, and what those are are the scraps, or the duds, or the rejects that don’t get perfectly folded in that butterfly-shaped-looking cookie, we accumulate and we sell it at a much discount. You know, they taste the same, they’re from the same recipe, but it’s just not the perfect cookie and those have become very very popular to where we just make them on purpose. We have one machine that is just dedicated to making the flat fortune cookie and then we just sell it along with the other crinkled up ones. And people come in daily and buy bags of them.
“A lot of my children visitors, these school kids, they always, after I introduce them to the flat unfortunate cookie, they really like that better. And I ask them, ‘Why do you guys like that better?’
"’Because you can put more of in your mouth at one time!’"
Tsue Chong’s innovations don’t stop with the “unfortunate” cookie:
“We make these fortune cookies in different flavors; some of the popular ones are strawberry, pina colada, mocha--it being Seattle, coffee capital of the world, you gotta have a coffee flavored on, so we have mocha--lemon, cinnamon. Many times we tried different flavors.
“We also do a custom message; if our customers want to put their own notes in, with the message, we can do that. Very popular for weddings, birthdays, but a lot of the companies are using that as a marketing tool; it's relatively inexpensive, and put a message in there and get your message or advertising across.
“In addition to custom messages I have people that approach me and ask if I could put engagement rings in; of course, when I do that--you’re talking about a several-thousand-dollar piece of jewelry, and they’re right next to me when we kind of fold and bend that into the cookie...definitely do it by hand, yes.”
And where do the fortunes come from?
“I will introduce you to the Chinese wise man that writes them up--I'm just kidding!...No, we have a printing company in the Bay area, that, it's more of a commercial business for him. He, as a business, printing and writing fortunes, writing and printing fortunes for a lot of the factories throughout the United States. And it's a very good business for him. So I sub that part of it out. I do do editing if I ever have feedback--negative feedback--but usually I don't. But if customers are kind of unhappy about a certain fortune, we just let him know, say, just don't publish that one anymore. We like to have positive, happy fortunes.
“Now, I gotta be honest with you: I don’t read my fortune. It’s just a thing I don’t do. I don't read my fortunes. I think I don't care; I’ve seen so many of them that I just kind of throw them aside until somebody says, ‘Hey, you gotta look at this!’”
