ON BOARD WITH Jack Cowin
The Canadian businessman has built a fast-food empire, but has grown to love the slower pace of superyacht life, as he tells Charlotte Hogarth-Jones
Jack Cowin clearly has a keen nose for business. Born in Windsor, Ontario, he left Canada for Australia in 1969, aged 26, with profit in mind, having convinced 30 investors to lend him $10,000 each so that he could establish a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise down under. The original investor got his money back within ten years, and the equity at net book value would be around $25 million today. Cowin now owns Hungry Jack’s, the Burger King franchise in Australia, along with Competitive Foods Australia, a business that includes more than 450 stores along with a food-processing division. He’s also an investor in the Lone Star restaurant chain in Canada and the chairman and largest shareholder in Dominos Pizza Enterprises, an A$7.5 billion market cap company operating 2,700 units across Australia, Japan, and Europe.. At the time of going to estimated his net worth as $2.5 billion. It should come as no surprise, then, that Cowin’s first yacht was conceived purely as a great business opportunity, rather than a hobbyist’s fantasy.
