Chris Thomas fulfils his early South Australia rural aims in a big way with son Darren and international foods firm
South Australia's Chris Thomas with son Darren, who created the Thomas Foods International conglomerate, including a vertically integrated strategy to bring Angus cattle to products on retail shelves. The Thomas family’s business model success was shown by its comeback from the 2018 fire at its Murray bridge abattoir to be replaced by a $300 million plant.
Main image courtsey ABC (Australan Broadcasting Corporation) Landline programme. Fire image by Peri Strathearn, Murray Valley Standard
Chris Thomas, the South Australian patriarch of Thomas Foods International, Australia’s biggest family-owned food producer, followed through in a major way on a childhood dream to be working in the rural industry.
Thomas spent many school holidays on a family farm near the Wimmera Mallee region and holiday trips included going to Alice Springs to buy stock. He left school at 15 to work first as a jackaroo at Oakden Hills station, north of Port Augusta, and then doing odd jobs in the region as a rouseabout developing an understanding of rural business.
Thomas returned to Adelaide to study wool classing at the Institute of Technology, then worked Coles Brothers as a stock and station agent: “I remember going to the cattle markets at the end of the main street of Mount Barker.” Thomas met another trader Bob Rowe at the markets in the early 1970s and started working for T&R Pastoral soon after. T&R at the stage stood for Turner and Rowe. Alan Turner was Bob Rowe’s partner, who run beef wholesaler Holbrook Meats, while Rowe bought the cattle. Thomas was as a Holbrooks Meats livestock buyer with Rowe.
In 1988, Turner’s share in the business was bought out by Chris Thomas. Bob Rowe and his son Simon were asked by Thomas to join him in a new business, conveniently retaining the T&R name into its second incarnation. The Rowes controlled the cattle side of the new business while the Chris Thomas and son Darren processed sheep and lambs in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria.
T&R started as trading operation in a joint venture with Metro Meats and using Metro’s abbatoirs as Murray Bridge, Gepps Cross and Noarlunga.” By 1997 T&R Pastoral moved from a trading company and became a very active in processing and export. Their first plant was an old government owned plant, the SAMCOR Meatworks at Gepps Cross its abattoir staff quickly rising from 30 staff to 230. Chris Thomas recalled it as “a defining moment.”
Adelaide Steamship’s ill-fated 1980s buyup splurge forced it to sell Metro Meat to the giant state-owned Chinese investment conglomerate Citic in 1991. When Citic decided to exit the Australian meat industry in the later 1990s, Rowe and Thomas made the bold play to buy them out and take over Metro Meat abattoirs. In 2006, Chris’s son Darren, at 33, became chief of the business and, two years later, the Thomases bought out the Rowes in happy parting of the ways, with Bob Rowe, then 72, wanted to pursue his own early dream of producing cattle. The Thomases were also happily 100% owners of the big abattoir at Murray Bridge, then processing 3,000 sheep and lambs and 300 cattle per day. (Rowe’s death in 2013 brought the name change from T&R Pastoral to Thomas Foods.)
The Thomases expanded the business rapidly, buying abattoirs in South Australia’s Lobethal, Tamworth in New South Wales and Wallangarra, Queensland. In 2010, they bought Foodcomm, the United States of America’s largest importer of Australian meat and their largest distributor, to get full control of the supply chain and capture more of the margin. Thomas Foods in 2012 took a 50% stake in meat wholesaler Holco, and with it the Country Fresh brand, and bought the remaining share in 2018. This added to the Thomas assets in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.
Another significant move, in 2013, distinguishing the Thomas strategy from others, was to buy one of Australia’s largest potato companies, Mondello Farms, combining the products into the same supply chain to the same customers. This was part of building a vertically-integrated business move into the retail field.
The strength of Thomas family’s business model was shown by its comeback from the major fire in 2018 at its Murray Bridge abattoir to be replaced by a $300 million plant.
