The Nostalgia of Jollibee

Is the fast-food chain a colonization of our culinary culture or the future of Filipino fusion?

It’s 2002 and my mom points a camera at my face, trying to get my attention.

With my mouth full, I stare directly at her as I sit at a white desk, surrounded by my Montessori classmates in Laguna. It’s my 4th birthday. I’m wearing a pink crown and eating Jollibee. In fact, the whole class is too. The white styrofoam trays, stamped with the face of a Jolly red bee, blend into our desks as we munch on sweet spaghetti and a piece of Chickenjoy. Hardly anyone talks. We’re all too busy enjoying one of the best meals of our lives.

Ever since I immigrated to the States, Jollibee has always emitted a sense of nostalgia for me. My family and I moved to a small town in California, so I would reunite with this beloved cuisine whenever we’d take day trips to denser Filipino-populated cities. This homecoming often began with excited exclamations upon seeing the joyous, yet slightly o-putting, red bee, and would end with a full stomach and burnt tongue from quickly taking a bite of a warm peach mango pie.

Growing up, I thought of the fast-food chain as an integral part of Filipino culture, a place where I would take college friends for their first taste of Filipino cuisine. I, along with other Fil-Ams, always told them that Jollibee equated to childhood. None of us ever questioned it. It was just the truth.

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Jollibee was officially founded in 1978 by Tony Tan Caktiong, an immigrant from Southeast China.

The name “Jollibee” was born out of a representation of the Filipino people: hard-working, busy, and indeed, jolly. Filipinos flocked to the restaurant’s doors to get a taste of its flagship product, “The Yumburger”, a simple beef patty and bun combo but topped with a special dressing. But it’s the “Jolly Spaghetti”, and the “ChickenJoy”, that has made a small fast-food shop explode into something much larger and influential, allowing it to succeed against fast-food giants, McDonalds and KFC. In about a decade since its official opening, Jollibee became a global brand, having its first overseas chain in Brunei in 1987, and its first U.S. chain in Daly City, California in 1998. Today, there are over 1500 Jollibee locations globally, stretching its likeness all the way from Europe to the Middle East.

Jollibee has become the “largest and fastest growing Asian restaurant company in the world”, as stated on their company website, which also states that their mission is to spread the joy of eating with an aptly-titled tagline “Joy Served Daily”. While I can agree that Jollibee does indeed bring joy, from its connection to childhood and memories of family gatherings, I wonder who is this joy brought to, what does it serve, and at the expense of whom? Especially in light of the company’s unwillingness to protect the rights and wellbeing of its workers and its attitude towards the LGBTQ+ community. Yet before this research, as a child of college-educated parents, who were financially-stable enough to cater Jollibee to an entire classroom, I never questioned my accessibility and outlook towards the fast-food chain. It brought me joy because it was given to me, like a treat. One that I felt foolish to refuse.

While the main focus of this article is towards Filipino cuisine and Jollibee’s relationship to it, it has been impossible to separate Jollibee from its food and its business practices.

The two seem to go hand-in-hand. Articles covering the history and rise of Jollibee use terms such as “domination”, “takeover”, and “empire” to illustrate just how wide the corporation’s reach and influence has been since the 1970s. While this might just be a product of patriarchal language, I can’t help but visualize a franchise that serves as a symbol of global capitalism and spreads joy, or rather a “standardized culture” through its menu items - items that are not necessarily new to Filipino cuisine. Sweet Filipino spaghetti has been a staple party dish, and so has Pancit Palabok. But what Jollibee has done, rather, is create a way to make them “cheap and widely available”. This decision to focus on Filipino food staples is among the reasons why it has succeeded over McDonald’s in the Philippine market. The fusion identifiable with Jollibee thus seems to stem more from a business strategy rather than a culinary one. Perhaps that’s where my hesitation to fully embrace it lies, despite understanding (and being complicit in) its cultural significance.

Whether or not Jollibee is a “colonization” of our Filipino culinary culture begins as a question of what our culinary culture is in the first place. Some cultural staples, such as banana ketchup and ube (which are used in Jollibee dishes), have no proper documentation on its first uses, but food historians and chefs in the Philippines have noted that our gastronomic origins began as a product of food availability and a submission to Mother Nature’s call. Eventually, through trade and conquest, our islands became influenced by other nations who brought over ingredients such as noodles, soy sauce, and spices. Filipino cuisine, over time, became a melting pot, yet held its own ground, like the dish “kinilaw”, which became something inherent to itself and the land.

There are over 7000 islands in the Philippines, each having their own unique and specific identity. Thus, the impossibility of placing Filipino culinary culture into a solidified box seems fitting and empowering. Jollibee’s position in this debate is then neither entirely a fusion nor a colonization, but rather a standardization of Filipino cuisine.

Due to the nature of fast-food operations, Jollibee is designed for consumers to get food quickly and eat food quickly. There is no time to savor the flavor profiles (or lack thereof), and there is no transparency as to where the food came from and how it got there. At the end of the day, Jollibee is a fast-food chain operating on quickness, reliability, and inexpensive service, at the cost of the treatment of its workers and to the land. Is childhood nostalgia enough to validate the momentary joy Jollibee brings? Is the longing that Jollibee satisfies actually a longing for something deeper? Of a cultural identity that has weakened due to globalization and capitalism?

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It’s 2022 and in the twenty years since my 4th birthday party, my connection to Filipino cuisine has evolved.

Adopting a more plant-based diet and my proximity to larger American cities, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, have opened me up to new and creative Filipino cooking, one that uses food as a way to reflect our place within the Filipinx diaspora. From Senor Sisig to HiFi Kitchen, these local restaurants have created a tasting menu not only of nostalgia, but also of possibility. Is this the future of Filipino fusion? One that is a matter of imaginative expression and intent?

Some may say these experimentations are a “manipulation of memory”, one that can cause a divide between older and younger Filipino generations. Yet both Senor Sisig and HiFi Kitchen have garnered acclaim due to their groundness in the locale, creating a distinct iteration of Filipino food through the community they serve. As echoed by Chel Gilla of Tselogs, this wave of inventive Filipino cooking (in the States and in our motherland) rose through the ingenuity of Filipino chefs understanding the potential of what our cuisine had to offer outside of fast-food chains. There was a desire for variety, a desire to embrace our complexity as Filipinos.

Jollibee remains to be a prominent figure in the Filipinx consciousness. Its clout connected to memories of childhood and family nostalgia - a time where things felt much simpler. Now, this has been shared to people all around the world, most of whom may not have ever known Filipino cuisine if not for the chain’s expansion. Is it possible then to acknowledge the shift Jollibee has created in our culture, while still not settling for it? Is it possible, as Filipinos, to reimagine a culinary culture that benefits all and punishes none? To truly have joy served daily for everyone involved? I, for one, really hope so.

Filipino food is often characterized as “the original fusion cuisine” with its “rich historical influences”, which feels like a fancy way of describing years of colonization. I find the description from Purple Yam’s founder, Amy Besa, more fitting: “[it is] food that was always ours and food that was borrowed and made our own.” By this definition of fusion, of taking two things and making something new, then the future of Filipino fusion lies in a cuisine that embraces our complicated history and ventures towards a horizon that opens up a culinary culture for the next generation. One that evolves not because of colonialism, Westernization, and capitalism, but in spite of it.