Inside OpenFortune: The Company Turning Fortune Cookies Into an Ad Network

A founder conversation about the strangest media buy in America, and the supply-chain logic that makes it work better than most digital advertising.

I don't remember the exact minute the fortune cookie thing stopped sounding like a joke to me. I remember the room, though. One of those loud, over-catered founder mixers where everyone is half-listening to whoever is in front of them while scanning for whoever they are supposed to talk to next. Someone introduced me to a founder from OpenFortune almost as an afterthought, the way you would mention a strange hobby. "Oh, and this is the fortune cookie guy." I smiled politely and braced for a pitch I could nod through.

That is not what happened. Within about ninety seconds the conversation had gone from "wait, you do what?" to me interrupting to ask a follow-up question, which is the actual tell that something has my attention. I ask a lot of polite questions in a given week. I don't interrupt very often.

What got me was not the cookie. It was the supply chain logic underneath it, explained with the quiet confidence of someone who has had this exact conversation two hundred times and stopped needing to sell it. We ended up sitting on a step outside talking about media economics for close to forty-five minutes. CPMs, banner blindness, why physical rituals survive when digital formats churn every eighteen months.

What OpenFortune Actually Is

Here is the pitch as plainly as I can state it: OpenFortune is an out-of-home advertising company that bought the fortune cookie supply chain and turned the little paper slip inside into a media unit.

That is not a metaphor. Per public reporting, the company, co-founded by Matt Williams and Shawn Porat, supplies custom fortune cookies to more than 50,000 Asian restaurants and delivery operations across the US, reaching by its own count more than 135 million people every month. The origin story is almost embarrassingly simple. Porat noticed over lunch that the fortune inside his cookie was the same recycled, decades-old line he had probably read a dozen times. He pitched Williams that this was wasted real estate: a format nearly everyone opens, reads, and often shares, carrying a message nobody had bothered to make interesting in fifty years. They launched in 2018.

The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. Instead of "Lucky numbers: 4, 8, 15, 22, 47," the slip carries a branded message, a line of copy, sometimes a QR code, distributed through a restaurant supply chain OpenFortune already owns end to end. No ad exchange. No programmatic middle layer. No algorithm deciding whether the message gets seen.

Practically everyone opens and reads their fortune cookie anyway. Why not leverage that extra space on the slips for new and engaging content?

The numbers OpenFortune cites are striking for anyone who has spent years watching organic reach decline and CPMs climb. Roughly 3 billion fortune cookies are consumed in the US annually. The format carries what the company describes as a 92% open rate. About 70% are read aloud or shared at the table, and around 6% are organically posted to social media, a share rate most creative teams would trade a limb for. Street Fight separately reported that roughly one in five people keep the slip.

The core value is not the novelty. It is guaranteed physical attention at a specific psychological moment, post-meal, relaxed, mildly curious, that no scrollable digital surface can reliably manufacture. The format cannot be scrolled past, skipped, or ad-blocked.

Three Campaigns Worth Studying

This is where most coverage of OpenFortune undersells the company, because the individual case studies are more specific and better measured than the "novelty ad format" framing suggests.

Duolingo: 40 million social impressions. Duolingo, already the most-downloaded education app in the world, did not need more downloads so much as it needed to re-engage lapsed learners without sounding like yet another guilt-trip notification. The solve was 500,000 custom cookies distributed nationally around Lunar New Year. Front slips carried deliberately cryptic, on-brand fortunes. Back slips carried a three-part structure: a nudge to finish your daily lesson, a subversion of the expected "Learn Chinese" cliché, and an actual Mandarin phrase that turned the cookie into a genuine micro-learning moment. The result was 40M+ social impressions, with 2.5 million from a single TikTok post by a creator who normally pulls 500 to 1,000 views, plus measured lifts of 15.5% higher likelihood to use Duolingo and 39% who started a real-world conversation about the brand.

Liquid Death: "Misfortunes." Liquid Death markets a persona more than a product. Going into Halloween, the challenge was avoiding the tenth haunted-hayride campaign of the season while driving sign-ups for their HorrorScope SMS list. OpenFortune inverted the format itself: jet-black cookies stuffed with genuinely unsettling one-liners instead of good fortunes, distributed in New York and LA, each carrying a QR code into the funnel. Ad Age picked it up, and it spread on LinkedIn and Reddit. For a brand whose entire equity is being funnier and darker than expected, warping an existing ritual beat inventing a new one.

MrBeast: a fortune slip that resold for $3,600. This is the case that made me reread the numbers. MrBeast, with 467 million YouTube subscribers, chose OpenFortune to promote Beast Games Season 2 not as a novelty add-on but as the primary real-world extension. Starting January 2026, 2.5 million customized cookies rolled out across the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, with 24,000 rare individually numbered collectible slips seeded into the run. Fans started hunting and reselling them. One slip, from only 2,000 specialty prints, sold on eBay for $3,600.

Co-founder Shawn Porat's read on why it worked is the most important line in the whole case study: the ritual already behaves like a game. There is anticipation, chance, and meaning built into it. When the most digitally sophisticated creator alive picks a paper slip inside a cookie as his primary physical-world extension, that is not a gimmick. That is distribution infrastructure.

How It Compares

There is no direct competitor, because the moat is the supply chain rather than the creative format. The honest comparison set is the broader field of out-of-home formats competing for the same "cut through the noise" budget line.

• OpenFortune wins decisively on attention quality per impression and on generating unpaid earned media. A large share of its campaigns get picked up by trade press without the company paying for coverage, which almost no OOH format achieves.
• AdQuick and programmatic OOH win on self-serve accessibility. If out-of-home is a small testable line item rather than a flagship campaign, buying through a platform is more efficient. AdQuick actually lists fortune cookies as one buyable format.
• Traditional billboard and transit win on raw reach and nothing else. Attention is passive, measurement is modeled rather than verified, and lead times run weeks.
• Paid social remains the baseline for lower-funnel direct response, but the attention quality gap is the entire point of this comparison. Banner blindness and ad blockers do not apply to a piece of paper someone unfolds by hand.

Where OpenFortune loses is programmatic control. You are buying a relationship and a campaign, not clicking boost. There is no public rate card. The primary navigation on their own site is Case Studies, Social Engagement, Blog, Video Testimonials, which tells you exactly what kind of company it is: one selling proof of work, not a dashboard.

What I Actually Think

The instructive thing about OpenFortune is not the cookie. It is the ordering of the strategic moves. They did not invent an ad format and then look for distribution. They bought the distribution first and built the ad product on top of it. That ordering is the entire moat.

Anyone can design a clever ad unit. Almost nobody can quietly acquire near-total control of a physical supply chain touching 135 million monthly consumers. This is the same principle I keep returning to in affiliate and creator commerce work: distribution ownership beats creative cleverness every time, because creative can be copied overnight and infrastructure usually cannot.

If I were advising a brand on whether to use this channel, here is where I would land.

• Treat it as top-of-funnel novelty plus earned media, not a direct-response workhorse. The secondary press value frequently exceeds the media buy, but only if your brand has a story worth amplifying.
• Always attach a trackable mechanism. Every campaign that reported hard numbers had a QR code, SMS keyword, or promo redemption path. Without one you are buying vibes.
• Borrow a real cultural moment. The strongest campaigns all tied to something already happening: Lunar New Year, Halloween, a game show's own logic. A moment-less cookie drop is a much weaker bet.
• Check your geography before committing budget. Reach concentrates where Chinese restaurant density is highest, meaning dense urban and coastal metros. A rural-indexing brand will see weaker reach per dollar than the topline figure implies.
• Budget relationship time, not just media spend. This is closer to a PR retainer than a programmatic buy, and you should arrive with a cultural hook already in mind.

The broader lesson I keep taking from conversations like the one that started this, on a step outside a loud mixer, is that the most durable growth ideas rarely look sophisticated on the surface. They look almost too simple, right up until someone shows you the actual numbers.