Family keeps its hold as South Australia's Thomas Foods International becomes a major meat exporter

Chief executive Darren Thomas (inset), second generation of the South Australian family owners of Thomas Foods International processing and distribution company.
Image courtesy Thomas Foods International

Thomas Foods International was determined to remain privately owned by the family who started the South Australian business, despite the estimated $300 million cost of replacing its Murray Bridge plant burnt down in 2018.

Vertically integrated from cattle feedlot near Tintinara in South Australian south east, Thomas Foods International company is one of Australia’s largest meat processors and its exports, mainly to the United States, China and Japan, represent about 80% of its business. It also processes and distributes vegetables and has joined with another iconic South Australian food business in Thomas Cappo Seafoods.

The company. founded as T and R Pastoral by Chris Thomas and Bob Rowe in 1985, originally bought livestock and contracted out meat processing. It bought the Murray Bridge abattoir, with 230 employees, and Lobethal abattoir in 2003 . A Western Australian abattoir and a defunct one in Port Pirie that was the sixth-largest meat processor in Australia.

The Thomas family took outright ownership of the company in 2008 and renamed to Thomas Foods International in 2013 when it was Australia's third-largest red meat processor and largest family-owned processor. It processed 5000 cattle and 120,000 lambs per week at four sites, including one at Wallangarra in Queensland. Thomas Foods International took up a 50% share in Holco meat storage and distribution in 2012, making it Australia's largest exporter of lamb and mutton, to more than 80 countries. A year later it added Mondello Farms, one of Australia's largest potato processors, and renamed it Thomas Foods International Fresh Produce.

The 2018 major fire at Murray Bridge plant, that has been processing 1,000 head of cattle and 11,000 sheep daily, meant transfer of jobs to Lobethal and Tamworth abbatoirs. (Port Pirie and Wllangara had been shut down.)  It didn’t stop Thomas Foods International setting up an office in Japan and expanding operations in China, the United States and Europe.

The company privately funded building a new larger state-of-the-art Murray Bridge plant on a greenfields site about 10 kilometres from the town.