About Food & Drink Business

Food & Drink Business

Overview

Food & Drink Business is the media platform for Australia's food and beverage manufacturing industry, published by Yaffa Media from Sydney. Through its website and daily digital newsletter, a weekly video news bulletin, a podcast and a bi-monthly print magazine, it covers the business of making food and drink in Australia: company results and transactions, manufacturing investment, processing and packaging technology, regulation and food safety, sustainability, and the executive moves that shape the sector. Its signature editorial product is the annual Top 100 Food & Drink Companies report, compiled with research firm IBISWorld, which ranks Australia's largest food and drink companies by revenue.

The title serves the country's largest manufacturing sector, and its reporting is pitched at the executives, plant operators, suppliers and service providers who run it — from multinational manufacturers and the big supermarket groups' supply chains down to the start-ups and craft producers entering the industry.

History

Food & Drink Business's lineage runs through its publisher's long engagement with the sector. Yaffa Media was founded in Sydney in 1925 by David Yaffa and remains an independent, family-owned Australian media company; it marked a centenary of operation in 2025. In its own centenary account, Yaffa records that one of its first acquisitions, in 1961, was Pig & Poultry News, the predecessor to Food & Drink Business, and that the publication has served the business needs of the food and beverage sector for the past 64 years. Food & Drink Business itself has, in managing director Tracy Yaffa's words, "been part of Yaffa Media for 50 years".

The founder's business began in photographic and editorial syndication — David Yaffa had travelled to the United States in 1920 and secured the Australian agency for the Underwood Photo Service, building an operation that distributed photographs, comics and features to newspapers across Australasia. Under his son, known in the business as DY, the company expanded its printing operations and moved seriously into magazine publishing, assembling a stable of more than 30 magazines at its height and later diversifying into events and digital media. The publisher broadened around the title over the decades — it acquired events company Two de Force in 2007 as it expanded into conferences and awards, rebranded as Yaffa Media in 2015 to reflect its move beyond print, and in the mid-2020s acquired Spanton Media Group, publisher of Australian Bartender and operator of the Australian Bar Awards and Sydney Bar Week, to deepen its coverage of the drinks and hospitality side of the industry. Yaffa Media describes Food & Drink Business, in its own billing, as the country's leading media platform for the food and beverage manufacturing sector, among the 16 brands in its stable.

Content and Coverage

The website publishes news daily: company reporting seasons and results, mergers, acquisitions and capital raisings, new plant and product launches, regulatory actions and industry policy, and executive appointments. Its coverage in 2026 ranged from analysis of the competition watchdog's court action against the major supermarket chains over allegedly misleading discount campaigns, to research on how GLP-1 medicines are reshaping packaged food categories, to company stories such as Tasmanian distillery Sullivans Cove expanding its international reach.

The print magazine, published bi-monthly — its April–May 2023 masthead priced a year's subscription at $53.46 — carries features, sector reports and profiles, with themed coverage of areas such as beverage production, meat, fish and poultry, sustainability, track and trace technology, packaging equipment and materials, dairy, plant design and fitout, and hygiene and safety. The flagship Top 100 edition each year combines the IBISWorld-compiled ranking of Australia's largest food and drink companies by revenue with the title's annual news review, merger and acquisition wrap-up and executive moves coverage; the Top 100 2025 edition was the current flagship issue promoted through 2026, and a Q3 2026 edition of the magazine was on desks in the spring of 2026. Around the core products sit a weekly video news bulletin, the monthly PLAY wrap-up of the biggest industry stories, Rising Star profiles of emerging businesses, and the Food & Drink Business Podcast, in which the title's editor interviews industry leaders — a series running since October 2020, with podcast directories listing some 80 episodes.

Audience and Reach

Food & Drink Business is written for decision-makers across food and beverage manufacturing: chief executives and senior managers of manufacturers, operations and engineering staff, packaging and ingredient suppliers, and the professional firms that advise the sector. The sector it covers is, on the title's own account in its Top 100 reporting, Australia's largest manufacturing industry, accounting for more than a quarter of all manufacturing — a scale that shapes the title's mix of corporate coverage, factory-level technology reporting and supply-chain news. Its Top 100 report is produced with IBISWorld data and is treated across the industry as a reference ranking of the sector's largest companies. No independently audited circulation or traffic figure for the title is published in the sources available, and none is claimed here; the title's reach claims appear in its publisher's media material and are its own.

Digital Presence

Foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au is the title's daily platform, carrying news, features, the podcast, video bulletins and subscription services, hosted on Yaffa Media's own content platform; magazine subscriptions are handled through the publisher's Great Magazines subscription service. The Spanton Media acquisition also brought the drinks sector's best-known events — the Australian Bar Awards, described by their founder as the "Oscars" of the bar industry, and Sydney Bar Week — into the same Yaffa stable, and the title's coverage now sits alongside that hospitality portfolio. The title maintains social channels under the Food & Drink Business name, sharing its daily news, magazine features and Top 100 coverage with its industry audience. The daily digital newsletter and weekly video bulletin carry the faster-moving coverage between bi-monthly print issues, and the magazine's digital editions are distributed through Yaffa's magazine platforms. The title is also active on social channels under the Food & Drink Business name, and its podcast is distributed through the major podcast services; podcast credits describe the show as produced on behalf of Food & Drink Business, owned and published by Yaffa Media.

Ownership and Organisation

Food & Drink Business is owned and published by Yaffa Media Pty Ltd, an independent, Australian-owned company founded in 1925 and now owned by Tracy and James Yaffa, with Tracy Yaffa as managing director. The title's editor is Kim Berry, who writes the magazine's editor's notes, hosts its podcast and is named as editor across its recent mastheads and podcast credits; the magazine's masthead in recent years has named Lindy Hughson as the title's publisher, with a small editorial team of staff journalists. Editorial pitches are directed to the editor through the title's published contacts. Although this directory listing follows the inventory's Melbourne assignment, the publisher and the title's editorial office are Sydney-based, at Yaffa Media's Surry Hills headquarters — a point readers reconciling the two should note.

Contact and Availability

Food & Drink Business is available at foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au, where readers can read daily news, subscribe to the newsletter and magazine, and access the Top 100 report. The publisher, Yaffa Media Pty Ltd, is based at 17-21 Bellevue Street, Surry Hills, New South Wales 2010, with the switchboard number published in the magazine's masthead, (02) 9281 2333, and mail directed to GPO Box 606, Sydney NSW 2001.