Chinese and Taiwanese American entrepreneurs are recreating the convenience foods of their youth for the farmers’ market and food-conscious set.

When Eric Wu was studying at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, he’d often hire a Zipcar and drive across town to the Great Wall Supermarket, where he’d load up on the least expensive dumplings he could find in the freezer aisle.

“I subsisted primarily on ramen noodles and frozen dumplings,” says Wu of his undergraduate years on a recent phone call.

Though they were a far cry from the lovingly homemade dumplings, wontons, and bao that his Beijing-born parents had raised him on, the cheap, imported, machine-folded packages of pork and cabbage encased in thin noodle answered a primal craving just well enough. Back then, Wu didn’t mind that the ingredients list on the package read like a sci-fi novel. Or that the quality of those ingredients that weren’t additives and preservatives was questionable and impossible to trace. But as he became interested in the intersection of agriculture and politics—he majored in science, technology, and international affairs—Wu wished he could easily find frozen dumplings that were made without industrially produced meat yet still protein-dense.

That led him to eventually cofound, along with Adam Yee in 2023, Sobo Foods, an Asian American health food brand whose flagship products are frozen dumplings with plant-based fillings like ginger “chicken” and “pork” and chive. And though Sobo’s dumplings are currently much more expensive than his college staple at around ten dollars for “what my mom would call a pretty small bag” of eight ounces, Wu hopes that in time they will be more accessible and even more ubiquitous.

“The primary thing we’re trying to be is delicious, healthy, Asian American frozen dumplings—and then the asterisk is that, oh, yeah, we’re plant-based, too,” says Wu.

Wu finds himself among a cadre of Chinese and Taiwanese American entrepreneurs who’ve recently placed their bets on the $5.92 billion global frozen dumpling market. Popular throughout East Asia, these two-bite packages of filled dough have different names depending on the cuisine and the style—even the half-moon-shaped Chinese jiaozi alone goes by many more names depending on how it’s prepared. In the United States, however, they have largely coalesced around the cuisine-agnostic term “dumpling.” (This article focuses on this style.)

For many of these founders, frozen dumplings represent the ultimate comfort food. Locked in each plump, pleated package are memories of grandparents and aunties folding dumplings around a large table, just waiting to be warmed up in a plug-in appliance like an Instant Pot turned steamer. Filled with ground pork and Chinese chives, napa cabbage and wood ear mushrooms, dumplings have been a mainstay of their freezers, no matter how busy or budget-conscious their lives were.

Now, with brands based in the United States, they’re tweaking the familiar formulas to reflect their own sensibilities and terroir. They’re using carefully sourced and outrageously flavorful ingredients like Berkshire pork from Upstate New York or potatoes and cheddar from New England farmers’ markets. And in doing so, they’re reshaping the frozen dumpling selection around the country—even if it means raising price tags significantly.

“The way our mom always cooked and taught us was that if you start with the best ingredients, you don’t need all the extra seasonings,” says Hannah Cheng, cofounder with her sister Marian of Mimi Cheng’s, a Taiwanese American restaurant specializing in dumplings in New York City. Founded in 2014, their business now includes wholesale and retail frozen dumplings that are available at stores including Whole Foods Market locations throughout the Tri-State area, where they retail for $9.99 to $10.99 per seven-ounce bag. The restaurant also ships frozen dumplings nationwide through Goldbelly.

The brand is named after Hannah and Marian’s mom, Mimi, who helped feed them through college and their early twenties by schlepping coolers full of her homemade dumplings to stuff in their freezers. Owing to her example, Mimi Cheng’s places great importance on the healthfulness of its dumplings, which incorporate fresh vegetables along with pasture-raised pork and organic chicken. The chicken, bok choy, and zucchini dumplings, for example, are a Mimi signature flavor that she created when her daughters were growing up using a neighbor’s home-grown zucchini. The shredded vegetables add juiciness to the ground chicken filling as well as nutrition—a balanced meal in a small package.

Today the sisters source local produce like ramps from the nearby Union Square Greenmarket for seasonal specials, and they work directly with Long Island farms and local butchers like Pino’s to get Berkshire pork. For now, they still employ a small staff of expert dumpling folders to hand-fold each dumpling they sell, both in their restaurant and for their retail products, although they say they are open to using automated machines to help scale their business in the future.

The goal, says Hannah, is to provide really high-quality frozen dumplings to customers all over the country—to be the sort of Taiwanese American mom they had for other college students and twentysomethings. And like their mom, they’re all for creating new flavors, like a chicken parm dumpling with mozzarella, basil, and tomato sauce.

“People will eat anything if you put it in a dumpling,” says Irene Li, founder and co-owner of Mei Mei Dumplings, a business that began as a food truck in Boston in 2012 and is now an educational dumpling classroom and café, with a retail line of frozen dumplings sold at 30 farmers’ markets and around 100 specialty stores across New England. Mei Mei also partners with Boston public schools to bring its dumplings to lunch programs, serving some 1.25 million dumplings a year. Mei Mei, which means “little sister” in Chinese, is named after Li, because she founded the company with her older siblings; today she co-owns it with partners Annie Campbell and Alyssa Lee.

“The primary thing we’re trying to be is delicious, healthy, Asian American frozen dumplings—and then the asterisk is that, oh, yeah, we’re plant-based, too.”

Li has a background in farming, and she wanted to build a dumpling brand that centered Chinese food while utilizing the best of local agriculture. Hence she says that 75 percent of the vegetables and all of the pastured meats that Mei Mei uses are sourced directly from local farms, and they’re used to produce dumplings in flavors like cheeseburger (stuffed with pastured beef, Cabot cheddar, and fried shallots), lemongrass pork, and five-spice tofu and mushroom. This commitment to buying local has led to some unusual creations—one of Mei Mei’s best-selling dumpling flavors, cheddar scallion potato, is a “New England Chinese” mashup that conjures chowder and pierogies, and it came about when produce was limited in the midst of winter.

“I was like, ‘What do we have in winter?’” Li recalls.

From its South Boston factory, classroom, and café, Mei Mei produces around 40,000 dumplings a week, with the help of its Anko HLT-700XL folding machine, which retails for around $20,000. The device comes with some 30-plus molds to crimp dough around filling in the manner of anything from empanadas to ravioli to soup dumplings, and Li says that machines like these are standard in today’s frozen dumpling industry.

“You can start to tell when people are using the same [machine] as yours,” she jokes.

Unlike other young brands, Mei Mei doesn’t have aspirations to be sold in supermarket freezers all over the country, due to the difficulties posed by scaling when sourcing from small farms. Li says that the packaging waste involved in shipping frozen food directly to customers isn’t aligned with her company’s values either. Instead, she and her partners are working with a distributor to expand into more specialty stores, hotels, and resorts. At $17 per 14-ounce package (around 14 dumplings), Li says that their typical customer at the farmers market has discretionary funds and appreciates having a direct connection with the makers of their food.

“We’re never going to be the cheapest option, so we’re focused on collaborations and selling to the kind of stores that people have a personal connection with,” says Li.

Sourcing ingredients on a scale required for mass dumpling production is a challenge, says Tim Ma, cofounder with Patrick Coyne of Laoban Dumplings. The chef and restaurateur has opened several Chinese restaurants over the last two decades in Washington, DC, including Lucky Danger and Any Day Now, and has been an advocate for sustainable ingredients and kitchen practices like composting. He joined Coyne in founding Laoban, a stand-alone retail dumpling brand, in 2019 with a “restaurant-first” approach, using only free-range chicken, Berkshire pork, and grass-fed beef in flavors like mala beef and ginger chicken. But it hasn’t been easy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when prices for beef and chicken skyrocketed, Laoban was eating costs.

“Our co-packer was like, ‘Are you sure you want to use this stuff? Because the price is really high,’” Ma recalls. But he and Coyne stuck to their guns, convinced that their carefully selected ingredients made their product better than the competition. “Most of the dumplings in a Chinese grocery store aren’t sourced in the best way,” he says.

Growing up, Ma says that his family primarily stocked whatever frozen dumplings were cheapest at the Asian supermarket in their home freezer in Arkansas. And wherever he’s lived, there hasn’t been a time when he didn’t have frozen dumplings in his freezer, he says. But often on weekends, he and his family, including his grandparents, would make dumplings from scratch together. He still eats dumplings at least twice a week, and he never gets sick of them.

Laoban dumplings are made with the help of co-packers and automated folding machines in the United States. What started out being sold at just one boutique grocery store in DC in 2021 has grown to a brand that’s available in 6,000 stores nationwide, including Whole Foods Market, Kroger, Sprouts, Costco, and Walmart. The prices and the size of the packages vary depending on the retailer—whereas Costco wanted to offer a large, three-pound pack that retails for $12.99, Walmart wanted to keep the price under $5, so Laoban created a small, 6.4-ounce size just for them that retails for around $4.99 for about eight dumplings. At most of the other stores, prices fall somewhere in between.

All told, Ma thinks they’re pretty reasonable prices for what you’re getting. But, he says, frozen Chinese dumplings are a relatively new category for generic American—not Asian—supermarkets, and attracting new customers there is a hurdle. Then there’s the age-old bias: “There’s the perception that Chinese food is cheap, and so I think there’s an upper limit to what people will pay,” he says. However, Ma says that once you see Laoban’s branding and identity—in millennial pink with a puffy font—you’ll realize it’s marketed toward a certain younger audience. That younger generation of customers tends to be pretty knowledgeable about food and is more willing to pay a premium for high-quality ingredients.

“Our co-packer was like, ‘Are you sure you want to use this stuff? Because the price is really high.’”

With all the modern dumpling brands that have appeared in the last several years, Ma hopes that this double standard regarding Chinese food pricing will change. It’s clear, after all, that Americans who are not of Chinese heritage love dumplings, too. Many may be just learning how convenient it is to have frozen dumplings on hand to feed their kids—and how many dumplings a kid can eat!

That’s where dumplings have a certain magic: once they’ve been implanted in your eating habits at an early age, it can be very, very hard to live without them in your freezer at all times. Perhaps frozen dumplings can be a game changer for Chinese food in the American grocery store—the conduit to level pricing perceptions and the pioneer for other Asian frozen food categories.

While Laoban isn’t doling out cheeseburger-themed dumplings, Ma considers their recipes to be modernized takes on Chinese classics. He’s aware that a lot of people from all backgrounds are eating them and has had to compromise on approachability at times. A nonnegotiable ingredient for him in the pork and chive flavor was Chinese garlic chives, or jiu cai, for the signature, funky flavor they lent. Growing up, when his family made dumplings, he would go in the backyard to snip the fresh chives off a plant. But for some people who didn’t grow up with those taste and smell memories, the pungency of jiu cai was off-putting. Laoban was getting complaints about the odor that wafted from the bag the moment it was opened. So Ma scaled back on the chives—but he certainly didn’t eliminate them. “We’re trying to find a line between keeping something authentic that we’re proud of and something that a lot of America will eat,” says Ma. “Which is interesting.”