Jollibee: one restaurant in Daly City became a 10,000-store global group

Public brand story. Compiled from publicly available reporting. This company is not a USAIS Global client; its trademarks belong to their owners. We tell these stories because they show what a U.S. presence does to a brand.

Before America

Jollibee had already done the improbable at home: it out-competed McDonald's in the Philippines. But a champion of a mid-sized home market faces a hard truth, global scale, global talent and hard-currency earnings all live somewhere else.

The U.S. move

In 1998, Jollibee opened its first American store in Daly City, California, chosen for its large Filipino community. Lines wrapped around the block. For years the U.S. business grew store by store on diaspora demand, then crossed into the mainstream as American food media discovered Chickenjoy.

Then the group used its U.S. position to buy American brands outright:

• 2018: majority stake in Smashburger (US$100M)
• 2019: The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for US$350M

What happened

Global stores (Sept 2025)	10,300+ across 30+ countries
Stores outside the Philippines	~6,860
North America network	360+ and expanding

A single diaspora restaurant became the beachhead for one of the world's largest restaurant groups, with U.S. dollar revenue, U.S. brands in the portfolio, and a stated ambition to be a top-five global player.

The lesson for exporters

• Serve the diaspora first, but design for the mainstream. The queue in Daly City was the market test; Smashburger was the strategy.
• A U.S. operating company can acquire. Once you're domestic, American brands and assets are buyable, the fastest route to scale.
• The Philippines holds E-treaty access, so Filipino owner-operators can run a U.S. expansion personally on treaty status.