By Matthew Monks
“We are very surprised. We never expected something to happen like this. We got great publicity,” said Derrick Wong, vice president of sales and marketing for Wonton Food Inc. “We expect our business will go up.”The company got waves of free publicity in the major broadcast and print media after the numbers in millions of its cookies matched five of the six drawn in the March 30 Powerball Lottery. After The New York Times broke the story May 11, it was picked up by CBS and MSNBC and papers in Washington D.C., Florida, Texas and Missouri, a search on Google News showed. “I'm shocked,” Wong said. “It's very exciting for people to win the lotto with our numbers.”The lucky numbers inside the cookies were 22, 28, 32, 33, 39 and 40 – the only digit that was off. Forty-two was drawn instead.The game is played in 29 states outside New York. A Tennessee player who matched all six won the top $25.5 million prize. Second place wins ranged from $100,000 to $500,000.Wonton Food has been in the city since 1973, shipping 4 million cookies a day across the United States and abroad. It opened a 4,500-square-foot manufacturing space in 1984 in Long Island City, where its fortune cookie numbers are written by hand, tossed into a bowl and chosen at random before being mass produced. The company will begin using a computer to generate the combinations later this year, Wong said. Its fortunes are split between traditional phrases and lucky numbers, which Wong said have become more popular in recent years. Most of its customers are restaurants, but the company has been adding more retail stores where the cookies are sold individually. Wong said the lottery exposure should encourage the trend. “Now people are starting to buy the cookies in stores because of the numbers,” Wong said. “Fortune cookies are not just give-away items. People really use the numbers.” Reach reporter Matt Monks at news@timesledger.com or 718-229-0300, Ext. 156.
