Small business takeaway:
- OpenFortune has transformed the social ritual of opening fortune cookies into a scalable marketing platform. By integrating brand messages into a shared dining experience, the fortune cooking marketing startup has captured consumer attention in a digitally saturated landscape while attracting major advertisers. Its success highlights how experiential, context-driven strategies can drive engagement and inspire adaptable marketing solutions across industries.
OpenFortune is expanding its unique marketing platform globally by tapping into the in-person social experience of opening fortune cookies, and the 3 billion consumers who eat them every year.
The company, which places ads on the back of the slips of paper found inside fortune cookies, has grown to the point where it’s distributing up to 135 million of the sponsored treats each month, in partnership with 47,000 restaurants. It has attracted advertisers from a range of industries, including brands such as Duolingo, Capital One, and Hulu, as well as MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube celebrity using the fortune-cookie ads to promote the second season of his reality TV show, “Beast Games.”
“With a fortune cookie, your guardrails are down and you’re actually forcing yourself to be open to suggestions while reading the content on the fortune cookie slip,” said Shawn Porat, Co-founder of OpenFortune, in an interview with CO—. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you are superstitious, you are reading that fortune and thinking, ‘How does this compare to my life? Am I going to come into money? Am I going to get a new job? Am I going to buy a new house? Am I going to go on vacation somewhere? What's happening next in my life?’”
That mindset creates an ideal opportunity for distributing marketing messages, he said, and advertisers seem to agree. Revenues at OpenFortune rose 145% last year over the previous year. In 2023, when OpenFortune experienced rapid growth amid partnerships with brands such as ZipRecruiter, Chime, and Cars.com, it was named to the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.
The physical fortune cookie–placed ads also differentiate in an attention economy where consumers face digital overwhelm and marketers look for ways to boost customer engagement.
The OpenFortune ads appear on one side of the slips of paper, while the fortunes and the lucky numbers, which previously had been on opposite sides, are combined on the other side. The fortunes can be written to dovetail with the ads, such as when the Duolingo campaign included fortunes scolding users of the language-learning app for skipping their lessons.
OpenFortune is the first and only company offering an ad platform inside fortune cookies, Porat said.
Turning little slips of paper into a marketing platform by tapping into the experiential nature of fortune cookies
Porat said he launched the business in 2017 while mulling over marketing strategies for a previous startup, when he happened to notice a group of people opening their fortune cookies.
“They were reading them out loud, comparing their lives to them, taking pictures and putting them up on social media, putting them in their pocket, in their wallet,” he said. “It was very eye-opening to see the impact that this experience has on millions of American families every single day.”
Although Porat said the share of restaurants that distribute fortune cookies has been declining slightly in recent years, the Chinese restaurant industry itself is growing. A report from IBISWorld estimated that the Chinese restaurant market in the United States totaled about $28.4 billion in 2025, growing at an annualized rate of 4.7% since 2020.
According to some estimates, restaurants worldwide buy about 3 billion fortune cookies a year, at a cost of about 4 cents per cookie.
As Porat began exploring the opportunity to turn the little slips of paper into a marketing platform, he decided that his mission would be twofold—both to create a money-making advertising business and to perpetuate the viability of the fortune cookie tradition. In exchange for distributing the fortune cookies containing ads, OpenFortune subsidizes the cost of the cookies, either completely or in part, depending on the arrangement with the individual restaurant operator.
Likewise, the economics of each agreement vary according to the volume and other factors, Porat said.
[Read more: How Brands Are Using AI to Optimize Digital Out-of-Home Advertising]
With a fortune cookie, your guardrails are down and you’re actually forcing yourself to be open to suggestions while reading the content on the fortune cookie slip.Shawn Porat, Co-founder of OpenFortune
Overcoming challenges to get buy-in from manufacturers, restaurants, and advertisers
Porat learned early on that the fortune cookie industry was not ready to make the transition to the OpenFortune business model, and it would take a lot of persuasion to convince manufacturers, restaurants, and advertisers to get on board.
“It took a lot of years of building trust, and for them to understand that our goals were aligned,” he said.
Porat started small with some limited tests before expanding to include more and more advertisers and more and more restaurants that agreed to distribute the fortune cookies.
One of the key challenges the company has faced has been convincing brands that fortune cookies offered a viable medium for carrying their message.
“Advertisers are used to what they’re used to, and this is something completely new,” Porat said.
Some brands were hesitant about how to create the right ads that would work in the current business environment and how they would measure their results, he said. That led OpenFortune to create its own internal agency dedicated to developing the creative content for fortune cookie advertisers and measuring their impact.
[Read more: How Businesses From The RealReal to Hinge are Leveraging Substack to Boost Brand Engagement and Growth]
MrBeast campaign highlights opportunities for media promotion: ‘It’s the perfect contextual placement to reach people before they're turning on their TV and after they're finishing dinner’
The company’s recent partnership with MrBeast illustrates the potential that fortune cookie ads can have reaching across media and capitalizing on the experience of opening fortune cookies.
For MrBeast’s Donaldson, the appeal was twofold, Porat said. The YouTube personality recognized the opportunity that putting his brand in the hands of family and friends who were dining together could be powerful, and he also hoped to capitalize on the fact that many consumers were likely receiving Chinese food orders at home and consuming them right before settling in front of their televisions for the evening.
“It’s the perfect contextual placement to reach people and tell them to check out ‘Beast Games 2,’ minutes before they're turning on their TV and after they're finishing dinner,” said Porat.
The MrBeast campaign included “Beast Games 2” messages inside 2.5 million fortune cookies distributed to U.S. restaurants, including 24,000 limited-edition fortunes that Donaldson himself wrote.
“What MrBeast saw immediately is that this ritual already behaves like a game,” said Porat. “There’s anticipation, chance, and meaning built into it.”
Before the recent “Beast Games 2” promotion, OpenFortune had already proven its TV marketing capabilities with a promotion for another show: the Hulu series “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay,” which came with its own made-for-fortune-cookies title. That campaign included the distribution of 1.85 million fortune cookies through delivery-heavy restaurants in order to maximize the opportunity to reach consumers in their homes.
Consumers often shared photos and videos of their “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay” fortunes on social media, helping drive 14.75-million–plus social impressions, according to OpenFortune.
In addition, the campaign resulted in 89% unaided recall among consumers, which OpenFortune Co-founder Matt Williams described in a LinkedIn post as “insanely high for any campaign.”
OpenFortune said the campaign led to a 51% increase in the likelihood that recipients would watch the show. As a result, Hulu followed with another OpenFortune campaign promoting its “Interior Chinatown” series.
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