Jollibee Foods Corporation
Company Background Tony Tan Cacktiong founder of Jollibee Foods Corporation tells a story about the success story of his company. There are many other stories about Tan and Jollibee that many people didn’t know about, and that would have remained unknown, If Tan hadn’t bested successful entrepreneurs from 30 other countries to win the “World entrepreneur of the year” Award in Montecarlo, Monaco, on May 28, 2004. Tan had always been low-key and media-shy. He was quiet happy to let his lieutenants do the talking for him to the press, actually – but his winning the award from the accounting firm Ernst & Young had forced him to agree to so many newspaper, magazine, and TV interviews later to tell them the story about the Jollibee story. After all it was he who won the award - not any of his lieutenants.
Still, if Tan had always been reticent about telling the Jollibee story beyond his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances, he had been equally reticent-if not more so-about revealing his personal history to the outside world. This reticence comes from humility. Unlike many corporate leaders who trace their lineage to wealthy Chinese clans, and who had studied in the more prestigious schools, Tan had comparably very humble beginnings, with his family exactly mirroring the stark circumstances in which the early Chinese immigrants found themselves in Manila. His father had been an immigrant cook in Binondo’s Seng Guan Buddhist Temple on Narra Street before he opened a small Chinese restaurant in Davao City, where Tan and his siblings helped clean tables and get water to customers.
It was his experience in his father’s restaurant that set Tan and his siblings on the road to entrepreneurship. In 1975, when he was set to graduate as a chemical engineer at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Tan and his family pooled P350, 000 to open 2 Magnolia ice cream parlors: Cubao Ice Cream House near the