Jack Cowin

Jack Cowin
Born	1943

Jack Cowin (born 1943) is a Canadian/Australian businessman who owns Hungry Jack's, the Burger King franchise in Australia and is the Executive Chairman of Competitive Foods Australia, one of the country's largest privately held businesses.

Born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1943, his father had been posted to Australia briefly by Ford and later encouraged his son to consider emigrating there.

He became an insurance salesman with London Life for four years in Toronto before deciding to visit Australia to assess some business opportunities. Seeing long queues at a Chinese takeaway restaurant while vacationing in Sydney, he became convinced that fast food would sell well. He later returned to Australia to evaluate expanding KFC into the market that at that stage had limited fast food options.

He bought the right to open ten KFC franchises in Western Australia, raised $10,000 from each of thirty people to launch the business in December 1969, having moved with his wife and young child. Those who invested $10,000 then, had an investment worth around $8.9 million as of March 2006.

After opening eight KFC outlets, he bought the rights to Burger King. They both later discovered someone else had the rights to the Burger King trademark in Australia, so Cowin instead called the outlets Hungry Jack's. Many years later he had a falling out with Burger King over the name and other issues related to their franchise agreement which was eventually resolved in his favour.

The business Competitive Foods Australia continues to be privately held by his family, with an estimated value of $350 million. It owns 50 KFC outlets in Western Australia and the Northern Territory in addition to the 350 Hungry Jack's outlets throughout Australia, only 100 franchised.

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