Jollibee opened at 934 Market Street on Thursday, July 31, drawing an overnight line. Mission Local reports it is the first of a planned 15-location Northern California expansion led by franchisee George Almeida.

Jollibee opened its doors at 934 Market Street at 9 a.m. on Thursday, July 31, roughly six years after the Philippine fast-food chain's name first turned up on a business permit for the address.

The room is registered with the City as Honeybee Foods Corporation, doing business as Jollibee, at 934 Market St., with a registration dated March 11, 2025, according to the City's business filings. The site sits on the stretch of Market near Powell, one of the downtown corridors the chain is betting can still draw a crowd. On opening morning it did: Mission Local, whose reporter Aaliyah Español-Rivas covered the scene, counted more than 100 people in line, many in folding chairs they'd hauled in for the wait. The family first in line — who began holding their spot the evening before — walked away with a year of monthly free six-piece Jollychicken buckets.

The Market Street store anchors a larger regional bet. Mission Local reported the location is the first of a planned 15-location Northern California expansion set to roll out over roughly eight years. The franchisee is George Almeida, known as the owner of California's last Fuddruckers, in Concord. "The Bay Area is Jollibee heaven," Almeida said in a trade-journal interview, pointing to the region's Filipino population as the brand's core.

That population has a longer history with the chain than Thursday's ceremony let on. Company officials billed the Market Street room as Jollibee's first in San Francisco; people in line knew better. A Jollibee at 200 Fourth St., across from Moscone Center, ran for over a decade as a community hub — a homesick-Filipino destination alongside the attached Red Ribbon bakery — before quietly closing in 2011. The first U.S. Jollibee opened in Daly City on June 12, 1998.

The Market and Powell location was years in the making after that name-on-a-permit moment in 2020. The pandemic, then a run of City permitting hurdles — new utility lines, noise requirements, exterior changes — pushed the date back repeatedly, according to Mission Local. Jollibee, the largest fast-food brand in the Philippines, runs some 1,600 locations worldwide. Whether a downtown corridor with a well-documented vacancy problem can sustain the first of Almeida's 15 is the open question the opening-day line doesn't answer.