Competitive Foods Australia

Competitive Foods Australia Pty Ltd (CFA) is the largest franchiser of restaurants in Australia. It is owned and operated by Jack Cowin. Its units include Hungry Jack's & KFC.

CFA currently operates at least four different restaurant brands.

Hungry Jack's, sometimes colloquially abbreviated to HJ's, is the exclusive Australian master franchisee of Burger King Corporation. With over 300 locations in the country, HJ's is the second largest franchisee of Burger King in the world.

When Burger King decided to expand its operations into Australia, it found that its business name was already trademarked by a man running a small takeaway food shop in Adelaide. Thus, BK was forced to change the name when it decided to open stores in the country - the only time this has happened in its corporate history. Burger King provided the Australian franchisee, Jack Cowin, with a list of possible alternative names that the Australian Burger King restaurants could be branded as. The names were derived from pre-existing trademarks already registered by Burger King and its then corporate parent Pillsbury. Cowin selected the "Hungry Jack" brand name, one of Pillsbury's US pancake mixture products, and slightly changing the name to a possessive form by adding an apostrophe 's' thus forming the new name Hungry Jack's. Accordingly, the first Australian franchise of the Burger King Corporation, established in Perth in 1971, was branded as Hungry Jack's.

Hungry Jack's currently owns and operates or sub-licenses all of the Hungry Jack's and Burger King restaurants in Australia. As the master franchise for the continent, the company is responsible for licensing new operators, opening its own stores and performing standards oversight of franchised locations in Australia.

In 1991, Hungry Jack's Pty Limited renewed its franchise agreement with Burger King Corporation which allowed the Hungry Jack's to license third party franchisee, however one of the conditions of the agreement was that Hungry Jack's had to open a certain number of stores each year for the term of the contract. In 1996, shortly after the Australian trademark on the Burger King name lapsed, BKC made a claim that Hungry Jack's had violated the conditions of the renewed franchise agreement by failing to the expand the chain at the rate defined in the contract and sought to terminate the agreement. Under the aegis of this claim, Burger King Corporation in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell's Australian division Shell Company of Australia Ltd., began to open its own stores in 1997 beginning in Sydney and throughout the Australian regions of New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. Additionally, BKC sought to limit HJ's ability to open new locations in the country, whether they were corporate locations or third-party licensees.

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