30 years of Countrywide

It’s been an extraordinary three decades supporting food service in Australia, with Australian families at the heart of everything we do. Here’s a brief look at where Countrywide has come from – and where we’re headed – with our “special ingredient” of family-owned distributor businesses.

Sebastian Galipo, founder of Galipo Foods describes himself as a “true believer” in Countrywide from the first inklings of an idea to create a national food-service conglomerate in the early 1990s.

Until then, most Australian food services businesses had been operating independently or in state-based groups, but momentum was gathering for a national cooperative to form to secure better prices from suppliers and optimised service for customers – and, importantly, help independents stand up against growing competition from corporates.

“For a long time, we all thought we could do it alone,” Galipo recalls.

“But these bigger players were getting bigger, faster, and the food service industry was changing – all of a sudden a lot of us could see there was a need. The original visionaries in the 1990s were Tom Bourne and Kevin Rose and Murray Anderson – they convinced me that we needed to get together.”

Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing when it came to uniting some 100-odd independent businesses 30 years ago.

Galipo recalls early Members being reluctant to share their pricing deals and some state groups believed their systems were supreme, but after much negotiation and many a stormy meeting, a framework was eventually agreed upon with an unlimited public company structure in 1996, and a new era of food service in Australia was born.

“Faxes were running wild, with people sending handwritten and typed up messages about ‘Why should I be doing this? Why should I be doing that?’ It got pretty messy,” Galipo recalls.

“There were two or three years of intense negotiations until we had a movement.”

It was the group’s first national conference at Twin Waters Beach Resort in Mooloolaba in 1995, where many say the true magic was born.

A giant hot air balloon with the Countrywide Food Service logo and the words “The future starts now!” was parked on the resort lawn, and Nelson Lay, owner of Asian United Food Service, says he will never forget the hum of possibility emanating from the group.

“As a family business, you didn’t often get the chance to meet 200 like-minded people,” Lay recalls of arriving at Countrywide’s inaugural conference.

“My vision was that there was only one thing this group could do – and that was to grow. We all bonded over having the same hurdle of wanting to grow our businesses.”

Few industries were affected as intensely by the COVID-19 pandemic than food service, but there was one surprising silver lining to come out of that tumultuous time.

“COVID no doubt put independents on the map more than they’d ever been,” Dhu says.

“Politicians who had thought food just got to restaurants through Woolworths and Coles, developed a far better understanding about the distribution channels and supply channels and the family businesses behind that.”