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.
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Holdings
CFA currently operates at least four different restaurant brands.
Hungry Jacks
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.