Tsue Chong Company was founded in 1917 by Gar Hip Louie on South Jackson Street in Seattle’s Chinatown neighborhood. Gar Hip founded the company as a noodle factory to supply the numerous local Chinese restaurants. In 1924, Gar Hip’s son Fat Yuen Louie took over the business, moving it to 8th and King Street. In the 1950s, Fat Yuen’s wife, Eng Shee Louie, helped pioneer the manufacture at Tsue Chong of fortune cookies, which were popular in the United States. By that time, the company was supplying noodles throughout the Pacific Northwest, and now they began distributing fortune cookies along with their noodles. In 1992, the growing business expanded into a larger facility at 8th and Weller in the Chinatown - International District.
After being owned and operated by four generations of the Louie family, Tsue Chong was sold to the Cheng family in June 2019. Father and son Camillo and Isaac Cheng, who previously ran the nearby Golden Pheasant Foods, continue to make noodles and fortune cookies under the Tsue Chung name at the 8th and Weller facility as of 2021.
This photo accompanied a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article on Tsue Chong’s fortune cookie business. Tim Louie, vice-president of the company, reported that Tsue Chong got its list of fortunes from United Automation Technology when it purchased the company’s “Fortune 5,000” cookie maker. United Automation president Yung Lee said that some of the fortunes on his list are Chinese proverbs, but most are ``just personal wisdom.'' The fortune in the center of this photo reads “Your happiness in intertwined with your outlook on life.”
Caption information source: “Product with a Future – Good Fortune Comes to Maker of these Cookies” by Lynn Steinberg, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 21, 1993, p. C1. Caption information source: Tsue Chong Company website at http://tsuechong.com/ Caption information source: ” Fortune cookie, noodle maker sold — Tsue Chong under new ownership” by Becky Chan, Northwest Asian Weekly, August 29, 2019. Retrieved at https://nwasianweekly.com/2019/08/fortune-cookie-noodle-maker-sold-tsue-chong-under-new-ownership/
