Dick Smith Foods - Licensing Arrangements and Business

Licensing Arrangements and Business

Dick Smith Foods does not manufacture its own food products. Instead, it sources products from other Australian-owned companies, which licence the Dick Smith Foods brand label.

Smith announced in 2011 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. Implementing a vision for the return to Australian owned, Australian grown produce where all the profits stay here, 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 Food Company, which pays Dick Smith Foods for the rights to the company's branding. DSF then donates a portion of its profits to charitable causes. In 2004, Smith announced his intention to make Dick Smith Foods a commercial operation, and to list it on the stock market by 2009.

Generally the brand focuses on producing local alternatives to products with large market shares like Kraft peanut butter and Vegemite. In October 2004, Dick Smith offered to purchase Vegemite from Kraft, but was unsuccessful.

In 2006, the Herald Sun newspaper reported that Dick Smith Foods turnover had halved, due in part to the difficulty of finding local suppliers for their products.