Dick Smith Foods was a food brand created by

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

Dick Smith to provide Australian owned and produced alternatives to products from foreign-owned food companies. Generally, the brand focused on producing local alternatives to products with large market shares like

Kraft The second incarnation of Kraft Foods is an American food manufacturing and processing conglomerate, split from Kraft Foods Inc. in 2012 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It became part of Kraft Heinz in 2015. A merger with Heinz, arra ...

peanut butter Peanut butter is a food paste or spread made from ground, dry-roasted peanuts. It commonly contains additional ingredients that modify the taste or texture, such as salt, sweeteners, or emulsifiers. Peanut butter is consumed in many countri ...

and

Vegemite Vegemite ( ) is a thick, dark brown Australian food spread made from leftover brewers' yeast extract with various vegetable and spice additives. It was developed by Cyril Callister in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1922. A spread for sandwiches, t ...

. However, Dick Smith Foods did not manufacture its own food products; instead, it sourced products from other Australian-owned companies, which licensed the Dick Smith Foods brand label. Dick Smith Foods also donated a portion of its profits to charitable causes. On 26 July 2018, Dick Smith announced that the business would close in 2019, blaming competition from German supermarket

Aldi Aldi (stylised as ALDI) is the common company brand name of two German multinational family-owned discount supermarket chains operating over 10,000 stores in 20 countries. The chain was founded by brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht in 1946, when t ...

History

Dick Smith Foods was formed in 1999 largely in response to the high market share of international companies such as Kraft, and the increasingly frequent take-over of previously Australian-owned companies including Arnott's and Pauls. In particular, Smith was concerned that many companies which were no longer Australian owned still marketed their products as "Australian": the iconic Australian breakfast spread

, for example, was owned by

Kraft Foods The second incarnation of Kraft Foods is an American food manufacturing and processing conglomerate, split from Kraft Foods Inc. in 2012 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It became part of Kraft Heinz in 2015. A merger with Heinz, arra ...

(now known as

Mondelēz Mondelez International, Inc. ( ), often styled Mondelēz, is an American multinational confectionery, food, holding and beverage and snack food company based in Chicago. Mondelez has an annual revenue of about $26 billion and operates in ...

), which in turn was (until 2007) owned by the

Altria Group Altria Group, Inc. (previously known as Philip Morris Companies, Inc.) is an American corporation and one of the world's largest producers and marketers of tobacco, cigarettes and related products. It operates worldwide and is headquartered in ...

(formerly known as

tobacco Tobacco is the common name of several plants in the genus '' Nicotiana'' of the family Solanaceae, and the general term for any product prepared from the cured leaves of these plants. More than 70 species of tobacco are known, but the ...

giant Philip Morris).Lewis, Peter
Dick Smith's tasty new adventure
''

Landline A landline (land line, land-line, main line, home phone, fixed-line, and wireline) is a telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber telephone line for transmission, as distinguished from a mobile cellular network, which uses ...

'' (

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), 23 April 2000. In 2004, Smith announced his intention to make Dick Smith Foods a commercial operation, and to list it on the stock market by 2009. In the same year, Smith offered to purchase

from Kraft, but was unsuccessful. In 2006, the ''

Herald Sun The ''Herald Sun'' is a conservative daily tabloid newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia, published by The Herald and Weekly Times, a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, itself a subsidiary of the Murdoch owned News Corp. The ''Herald S ...

'' newspaper reported that Dick Smith Foods turnover had halved, due in part to the difficulty of finding local suppliers for their products. In 2011, Smith announced that he would be taking control of the management of the company again, after turnover dropped from $80 million to $8 million over the previous five years. He implemented a vision for the return to Australian-owned, Australian-grown produce where all the profits stay in Australia, instead of heading offshore as they do with the majority of foreign-owned food suppliers. The company had previously been managed, and some of its products produced under licence, by the

Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing Company The Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing Company is the trading name of two sister food companies (Australian Health and Nutrition Association Ltd and New Zealand Health Association Ltd). Both are wholly owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. F ...

, which paid Dick Smith Foods for the rights to the company's branding. On 26 July 2018, Dick Smith announced that the business would close in 2019 in order to avoid bankruptcy. Smith blamed competition with German supermarket

's products for the demise of the brand.

Legal issues

Dick Smith Foods ran into legal difficulties in 2003, when

Arnott's Biscuits Holdings Arnott's Biscuits Limited is an Australian producer of biscuits and snack food. Founded in 1865, they are the largest producer of biscuits in Australia and a subsidiary of KKR. History In 1847, Scottish immigrant William Arnott opened a ...

took the company to court. The issue was a trademark dispute over Dick Smith Foods' "Temptin'" brand of chocolate biscuits, which Arnott's alleged had diluted their trademark for their similar

Tim Tam Tim Tam is a brand of chocolate biscuit introduced by the Australian biscuit company Arnott's in 1964. It consists of two malted biscuits separated by a light hard chocolate cream filling and coated in a thin layer of textured chocolate. Hi ...

biscuits, in similarly designed packaging. The case was settled out of court, and Smith responded by casting Greg Arnott, a member of the Arnott family, in a commercial for Temptin's.An Arnott is latest weapon for cheeky Dick
, ''B&T'', 26 September 2003.

References

{{reflist, 2

External links

Dick Smith Foods website
Food and drink companies established in 1999 Food and drink companies of Australia Australian brands Australian companies established in 1999