Burger chain boss Jack Cowin hungry for more stores

Jack Cowin likes to boast that he has eaten more hamburgers than any other Australian, but he’s still planning to open more stores.

Jack Cowin’s Hungry Jack's is celebrating its 50-year anniversary.

Jack Cowin likes to boast that he has eaten more hamburgers than any other Australian in the history of the nation, and he’s certainly had every opportunity to reach that epicurean milestone with his Hungry Jack’s chain this week celebrating 50 years since it opened its maiden store.

“I have not done much flipping of burgers but I have done a lot of consuming, I claim to have eaten more hamburgers than any other individual Australian on earth and I am still alive, still going strong,” Mr Cowin said.

“One of the ingredients of any success we have had has been to hire people that can do the flipping better than I could, and knowing your own limitations of what you can do and what you can’t do was important.

“So, I am a big consumer and my job was to hire the right people, to get the money, find the sites and grow and work on the business not necessarily in the business — you delegate but you don’t abdicate.”

As a burger flipper Cowin might have been second rate, but as a business owner and manager he has absolutely shot the lights out on the success of Hungry Jack’s, since it opened its first store in Perth in 1971 to today where it is a multi-billion leader in the fast food sector with 440 restaurants and 20,000 staff.

Cowin, a Canadian, found his way to Australia in the late 1960s thanks to some sage advice from his father who took on a job in Geelong, regional Victoria, to help build the engine factory for Ford.

“He came back and said ‘if I was young again I would move to Australia, it is the land of opportunity, the future, land of milk and honey, everything is great’ … so I was predestined to want to come to Australia.”

The next step is a magical mix of being in the right place at the right time, some luck, the power of compound growth and the fruition of a father’s advice to his son that his fortune could be sought on the other side of the world.

After some market research, Cowin raised $10,000 each from 30 fellow Canadians — not bad for an untested kid in his 20s — came to Australia in 1969 and started his first Hungry Jack’s in Perth, the city partly chosen because it was as far away from Sydney as possible where he had an existing contract with a rival US fast food chain.

Today Mr Cowin is worth $3.77bn, Australia’s 20th richest person, and those Canadians that invested 50 years ago still own 2 per cent of the Hungry Jack’s empire, with each original $10,000 investment now worth a staggering $40m.

“They got their money back, it was a brave undertaking to do and so in many ways I am grateful and otherwise they would be shovelling snow in Canada.

“Thank god there were people who were prepared to back me and this adventure,” Cowin told The Weekend Australian.

Cowin is not letting up on the growth potential of his Hungry Jack’s empire and wants to almost double his store count, although he won’t be turning to outside investors to help fund that growth.

“We continue to grow and expand, we are a successful business which produces cash that we reinvest back into the business. We have 440-odd restaurants and we want to have 700, we have 20,000 people and we will double that.

“In terms of public versus private, we are private and we like it that way.

“If you need the money that is different, but we are a self financed business.”

Cowin remains executive chairman of Competitive Foods Australia, one of Australia’s largest privately held businesses and which owns the Hungry Jack’s business, with his son-in-law and one son working in the company.

Turning to the current strength of the Australian economy, Cowin described the local business environment as being “more up than down” and the banking sector awash with cash.

“I had a meeting with bankers the other day and they have never had more cash in the system than they do today, we have this pent up demand from people being locked down and this will continue to grow and expand. So much more upside than downside.”

And the genesis of the Hungry Jack’s name has nothing to do with its founder Jack Cowin, but was a borrowed trademark from a company in the US that sold pancake mix and mashed potatoes in supermarkets.