We aren't particularly big fast food eaters, especially with my wife being into fitness/yoga/healthy living etc, but whenever we come across a Jollibee on our travels we do make the effort to eat there and always eat Jollibee at least once on our trips back to the Philippines. My kids have Jollibee toys and love to eat there, despite having only been in a jollibee a handful of times. McDonalds, KFC and Burger King are an even rarer food for them, yuck.... Jollibee have branches all over the world including the USA, Middle East and Asia. A few years ago I was in Miami and with a Filipino friend we flew up to New York La Guardia and caught a taxi (yellow cab??) straight to Jollibee in Queens which was absolutely crowded with Filipinos ordering food. Every aspect of the restaurant was authentic, and you could for a moment feel as though you were back in South East Asia enjoying a Yum with Spaghetti meal. Although the only down side was the high cost, I can't recall exactly, but it was something like 40 dollars for three of us to eat. Yikes!! So with one good experience we took a drive upto Dubai for the weekend (about 4 hours from our house here in the sandpit) and decided to try out a Jollibee. It took Google Maps and a lot of effort to find one of the four restaurants and the reviews online were poor. Eventually we found a pizza restaurant that had a jollibee mascot outside and a jollibee menu..... very odd. We sat down and ordered the Jollibee which was delivered to us on plates (quite novel), but I have to say it was awful. My kids just looked at it in disgust, and we left leaving about 3/4 of the meal behind. Never again will we try Jollibee in the UAE.... Now I wonder when they will consider opening a Jollibee in Earls Court. I actually write several letters to Jollibee asking about overseas franchises and the possibility of entering a franchise agreement for a UK shop in Earl's Court. It was just speculative, not a totally serious proposal, but was given a short reply advising that they were not going to consider expanding their international franchises any further. This was around two years ago. So there you have it, Jollibee around the world
Years ago I was flying into Manila and the chap sitting next to me turned out to be a MacDonalds food scientist visiting to check out their operation in the Philippines. "This is the only country in the world where we have real trouble from a local competitor", he said.
On a day to day basis, we only have a Macdonalds here in the Isle of Man. Just one. And it is heavily subscribed. We don't even have a Burger King. There is a certain amount of protectionism here, you understand. So, personally I would be glad of another burger joint here, whether it be Burger King or Jollibee or anyone likewise. I probably have a Macdonalds burger about once a week but never anymore frequent than that. More out of convenience than anything else as my wife puts together a great home made burger, these days. But I would like to see Jollibee over here. But no doubt it would need to be launched in a larger catchment than the I of Man. And why should it not succeed! I can imagine us Brits enjoying it as much as the many Filipinos over here.
It is well known that Jollibee are the only burger company to ever establish a home presence that prevented incursion by a foreign major company, saying that McDo have a presence there and my kids like both but prefer McDo these days. I remember reading a long article on how Jollibee started out in the 70's it was very interesting the current Wiki article is not as detailed, I will try to find the one I read some years back and post a link.
Jollibee is certainly a success story. I'm not sure what the current figures are but for many years they were able to clobber McDonald toe-to-toe. McDonald's has made big strides over the past few years.
Just a pity Jolibee burgers are so minging!!! The wifes family like them as a treat if we take some of them into Tacloban but if I have to I go for a MacD's or preferabily a Shaky's pizza. Atleast I can get a beer then though it ain't cheap.
That Jollibee burgers are minging, is pretty much irrelevant. Tony Tan's brainwave, and the reason why the Philippines is the only country in the world where McDonalds isn't #1 in market share, is because he realised that the Philippines is a noodles and chicken-and-rice kind of country. It's not a bread and burger-and-fries kind of country. Walk into a busy Jollibee anywhere in the Philippines and see what the customers are actually eating. Only about 10-15% are eating burger-and-fries. The rest, the massive majority, are eating spaghetti and chicken-and-rice. McDonalds followed suit and were forced to put spaghetti and rice on the menu. The Philippines is the only SEAsian country I know where McDonalds does this. In Thailand and Malaysia, they definitely don't. Jollibee have recently announced they are expanding internationally even more, and they WILL be opening restaurants in Australia. But in the UK, I wouldn't be so sure. Filipinos in the UK are not distributed the way they are in the USA, where they are mostly concentrated in a few places. In the UK, Filipinos are much more spread out all over the place and too diluted.
I used to like jollibee mainly because of the bee outside. There are only a few jollibee restaurants in the USA. I ate in one and wrote about it, which you may view here if you are interested. http://thefilam.net/archives/13930
It's quite interesting to see the menu offerings of McDonalds in different parts of our planet. Revealed: The secret menu items you didn’t know you could order at McDonald's http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...u-could-order-at-McDonalds.html?frame=3131848 And here too, showing the Philippines McSpaghetti… http://metro.co.uk/2014/07/07/black...orld-we-wish-we-could-get-in-britain-4790206/
I don't think so. Yet. However there has been talk in the press that Jollibee is due to expand to Europe in 2016. http://www.thedailymeal.com/news/travel/jollibee-open-uk-and-italy-2016/110615 I heartily dislike the freakishly unsettling red-haired clown and his garish golden arches. The world will be a poorer place when there is a McDonalds in every city.
Thank you. A well-written evocative piece. But I think there's more than just 'a few' Jollibees in the US. Like maybe - and this is just a guess - about 15-20. I would be interested to know how much the Jollibee restaurants reflect the Fil- Am demographic spread, half of whom live in Hawaii and California. I wonder if half the Jollibees are in those states as well. The rest will be I guess in the big population centers like NY/NJ, Houston, Chicago.
Thanks. There are 22 in CA and about 4 in HI and the rest are allocated one per state in several states including VA NV TX, NY and NJ but not IL which accurately mirrors the population density.. I admit though that I would classify that as 'a few' in a country with an area of nearly 10 million square km. To acheive the same Jollibee density in the UK we would need less than one Jollibee, which is probably what we are going to get.
I realise that in a country the size of the US a chain restaurant having only about 30 outlets is not a lot, but really the expression 'a few' means a handful, or several. Not two or three dozen. How many in Hawaii? There's as many Filipinos there as in New York, Texas, and Illinois combined.