Boston • New York • Detroit
Boston • New York • Detroit
The fortune cookie is beloved, but it has always been a zero-profit product. SecondFortune produces seven million cookies a day and owns 80% of the market, running four factories around the clock.
Every obvious lever was closed. Increasing market share only increased operating costs. With no foreseeable growth in the number of restaurants, expanding the market wasn’t realistic. And charging more for something restaurants hand out for free was never going to work.
The question was where the value in a fortune cookie actually lives, and whether it could be moved.
The cookie is packaging. The fortune is the product. People perform end-of-meal rituals around them, save them in wallets, tape them to refrigerators. It’s a tradition that closes every Chinese meal with a touch of magic, and the client owned it 80% over.
We noticed the other permanent fixture on the dinner table: the mobile phone. If the fortune already had someone’s full attention at the end of a meal, the phone was six inches away and the handoff cost nothing.
SecondFortune.com gave the ritual somewhere to continue. The paper fortune became an invitation, and the platform behind it became inventory that national brands could buy into.
At launch, SecondFortune hit a 35% click rate, translating to nearly 78 million unique visitors a month. That audience opened marketing and promotional opportunities with major brands including Disney, which continue to generate revenue today.
A product that couldn’t be sold for more became a platform that could be sold to someone else entirely. Same cookie, same factories, same 80% of the market. New buyer.
Thirty minutes. Bring the business. Leave with the one thing worth building everything else around.
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