Red Ribbon Brand Guidelines: A 1979 Timog Avenue Cake Shop in the Jollibee Group

A family cake business in Quezon City.

Red Ribbon began in 1979 as a small cake shop on Timog Avenue in Quezon City. English Wikipedia says it was established by Amalia Hizon Mercado, her husband Renato Mercado and their five children, and that the cakes developed by their daughter Teresita gave the shop its prominence. The Philippine Star, reporting in August 2005, said the business “started in 1979 out of a home kitchen.”

The company tells the origin as a hobby that grew. Its United States website says the cakes were first shared at family get-togethers, that orders then came from relatives who passed the word to a wider circle of family and friends, and that the hobby became a business once the cake boxes were tied with a red ribbon, which the company now treats as its symbol. In the company’s telling, the brand name comes directly from its packaging.

The Jollibee Group’s brands page repeats the same story in one line, describing Red Ribbon as having grown from “one homemaker’s hobby-turned-business.” Across both company sites the emphasis falls on cakes for family celebrations, and English Wikipedia likewise describes Red Ribbon as making baked goods primarily for family occasions.

From that start the shop became a chain under the family’s ownership. English Wikipedia says Red Ribbon began franchising in 1999, two decades after the Timog Avenue opening, and by the time of the 2005 sale it had 131 outlets in the Philippines, The Philippine Star reported.

Cakes, mamon and an early move to California.

Red Ribbon looked abroad early. English Wikipedia says it opened its first overseas outlet in West Covina, California, in 1984, five years after the first shop, and by August 2005 the chain had 16 outlets in California, according to The Philippine Star. The brand’s United States operation now runs its own website, menu and online ordering.

The range is built around celebration cakes. The Philippine Star described the 2005 business as selling cakes and pastries alongside Filipino dishes and confectionery. The American menu, as published in November 2026, groups the range into round and square cakes, bar cakes and cake slices, rolls, dedication cakes, sweet pastries and empanadas, with ensaimadas, chicken empanadas sold by the box and several ube-flavoured cakes and rolls.

Savoury food sits alongside the bakery. The same American menu lists combo meals and family meal bundles, with Filipino dishes such as palabok and arroz caldo, and it offers cakes for pick-up, delivery and shipping. On its own pages, the brand presents the cake counter and the savoury menu side by side.

The packaging story carries through the brand. The company’s own account puts the ribbon on the cake box at the centre of its name, and its American site calls the red ribbon the brand’s symbol, a cue that links the shop sign, the boxes and the name in a single image.

Filipino restaurant and snack chains.

The Philippines’ restaurant, bakeshop and snack chains tend to present themselves through a small set of recurring elements: a shop name and sign that customers can spot in a mall or on a busy road, menus organised around named dishes and named cakes, and packaging that travels home with the order. Some brands take their names from a place or a founder; Red Ribbon, by its own account, takes its name from the ribbon once tied around its cake boxes.

Many of these chains now sit inside a few restaurant groups. Jollibee Foods Corporation, which adopted “Jollibee Group” as its corporate brand in July 2025 according to BusinessWorld, owns brands including Jollibee, Chowking, Greenwich, Red Ribbon and Mang Inasal. Max’s Group, which traces itself to the Max’s Restaurant fried-chicken café of 1945, runs another portfolio of casual-dining brands, according to its own website.

Franchising is the usual route to growth, at home and abroad. Group and brand websites publish franchising pages for the Philippines and, in several cases, for international partners, and some chains have opened abroad. Red Ribbon is one example: it opened in California in 1984, according to English Wikipedia, and had 39 stores in the United States by October 2022, The Philippine Star reported.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, when and where, who owns it now, and how its own pages and the Philippine press describe its menu, stores and franchise network. Counts of stores are given with the date of the source, and claims that rest only on a company’s own word are marked as such.

Inside the Jollibee Group since 2005.

In August 2005 Jollibee Foods Corporation told the Philippine Stock Exchange that it had reached an agreement with Red Ribbon’s owners to acquire 100 percent of the bakeshop chain and its 147 outlets, 131 in the Philippines and 16 in California, The Philippine Star reported; at the time the deal was still subject to final due diligence and a sale agreement. The paper said Red Ribbon would join a group of 1,079 stores that then included the Jollibee, Chowking, Greenwich and Delifrance chains. The Jollibee Group’s history timeline lists the acquisition of Red Ribbon Bakeshop in 2005, and English Wikipedia says Red Ribbon Bakeshop, Inc. is managed through a Jollibee holding company, RRB Holdings.

Under the group the American business kept growing. The Philippine Star reported that Red Ribbon opened in Philadelphia on 15 October 2022, its 39th store in the United States and its fifth new store that year after openings in Houston and Bolingbrook, Illinois, and that the brand then had 526 outlets in the Philippines. The paper said customers had queued the night before the opening at the Great Northeast Plaza shopping centre, and described Red Ribbon as offering baked goods inspired by Filipino flavours and ingredients. As of November 2026, the company’s American site described more than 30 bakeshops in California, Nevada, Washington, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Texas and Illinois, and the group’s brands page described a chain of more than 500 branches across the Philippines and the United States.

In July 2025 the parent adopted “Jollibee Group” as its corporate brand, keeping Jollibee Foods Corporation as its legal name, BusinessWorld reported, and named Red Ribbon among the brands covered by the new identity and brand architecture. The group’s brands page takes franchising enquiries for Red Ribbon in the Philippines.

For a design guide, Red Ribbon shows how a single piece of packaging can become a name, a symbol and a whole identity, carried from a Quezon City kitchen to shopping centres in California and Pennsylvania. Compare Goldilocks, another Philippine bakeshop chain, and Jollibee, its parent’s flagship. For this guide we use a ribbon red, a cake-box cream, a mocha brown and an ube violet with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Red Ribbon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.