In the English nursery rhyme that has amused generations of young children, Goldilocks is the girl who stumbles on the home of a respectable bear family when they are out on a prowl. She messes up their furniture, eats their porridge, and falls asleep on one of their beds, but soon wakes up and runs for her life when the bears return, angered by her intrusion into their privacy.

Not many grownups in the Philippines will perhaps remember the lesson of this little morality tale, but the name and image of the golden-haired intruder is today firmly etched in the Filipino consumer’s mind as a symbol for good food and celebrations.

And the Goldilocks brand has become not only a family icon for get-togetherness but a P6-billion company that serves good, affordably-priced foods—from cakes, pastas, and noodles to Filipino-style ready-to-eat meals and snacks.

It was to achieve easy recall that the founders of Goldilocks, Milagros and Clarita Leelin, chose Goldilocks as the name for a small cake shop that they opened in 1966 in a one-door apartment in Makati (now a city). They wanted a name that could have a strong, immediate appeal to their primary target market: mothers and children. They also wanted it to bring to mind prosperity and good luck.

They picked “Goldilocks” because it met those two criteria. It was not only the name of a character of a very popular nursery rhyme but it had the prosperous-sounding syllables “gold” and “lock.” Being of Chinese descent, the two Leelins considered gold as a color of prosperity, and “lock” was, well, a word that to them sounded like “luck” as well. The logic was perhaps something like “Lock in the gold for luck.” As Pinky Yee, the Goldilocks marketing director, explains, “They liked ‘Goldilocks’ because of the double meaning.”

The Leelins might have stretched word meanings when they picked Goldilocks as a brand name, but they stuck with that name for good during the next 40 years. The cake shop grew into a major food-service company in the Philippines.

From a startup capital of P10,000 and first day sales of P574 (equivalent to roughly P366,300 and P21,025 today, when adjusted for inflation), Goldilocks now grosses over P6 billion in annual sales and has a total of 208 stores nationwide, nearly 70 percent of them franchised outlets.

It has also expanded its business overseas, opening 17 Goldilocks stores in the United States and one in Canada. No doubt, the Goldilocks name has brought prosperity and luck to the Leelins in more ways than they could have imagined.