HistoryChairman Kwan's opened Keefer Court Bakery in 1983. It is located on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, located near the West Bank of the University of Minnesota. This was the first Chinese bakery in Minnesota, and specialized in making Oriental pastries, plus baked its own fortune cookies under the Golden Plaque #1 label. It took three people to make 2,000 cookies an hour. For the custom fortunes, there were no computers, so every fortune was written by a typewriter.As the Midwest demand increased, Chairman Kwan knew he had to invest in fully-automated machines to keep up with the competition and be able to fulfill wholesale orders. His purchase allowed Keefer Court Food to produce 14,000 fortune cookies in an hour. Keefer Court Food saw a great increase in the wholesale fortune cookie business, which allowed for the construction of Keefer's own fortune cookie manufacturing facility in 1995. Midwest restaurant owners loved the quality they tasted when eating a Golden Plaque fortune cookie, so Keefer Court started to manufacture private labels for major national food service distributors and local restaurant owners.Chairman Kwan launched an e-commerce site in 1999. The site featured options for customers to customize their fortunes, style of cookie and order in small amounts. Embarking on a new frontier, the site dominated the online custom fortune cookie market. Shoppers anywhere in the world could easily order a customized, entertaining gift for any occasion.