Olga Oksman wrote about where fortune cookie fortunes come from:

• The companies that make fortune cookies have massive databases with tens of thousands of fortunes that are randomly selected and printed.
• They continuously seek to expand this database by paying high schoolers and failed writers to come up with more.
• One company pays about 75 cents a fortune and requires at least 700 of them.
• The fortunes have to be bland because each of the 3 billion cookies that are consumed need to have a fortune that could apply to anybody.
• The lucky numbers that show up on fortunes are computer generated.
• People put a lot of faith in the cookies – 110 people won the Powerball in 2005 because they all played the numbers they got in their fortune cookies.

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Source: The Guardian