As one of Australia’s largest meat processing and packaging companies, Hilton Foods has partnered with DLL Group, a Rabobank-owned global finance provider specialising in food‑equipment funding across Australia and New Zealand. Through this partnership, DLL has supported Hilton’s strategy to accelerate smarter production, drive innovation, and strengthen supply‑chain resilience.
In Australia’s supermarket cold chain, “innovation” is rarely a single breakthrough. More often, it’s a relentless road of upgrades – new packaging formats, tighter compliance requirements, faster throughput, sharper yield, and the next efficiency gain that protects affordability at shelf.
For Hilton Foods Australia, that upgrade cycle plays out across three major processing sites and a distribution footprint built around one of the country’s biggest retail supply programs.
For DLL, it’s where asset finance becomes a lever for modernisation by funding essential equipment so manufacturers can keep pace with rising expectations in safety, traceability, cost-to-serve, and sustainability.
Financing innovation
DLL business development manager, Luke Austen, says its role is to enable equipment-led transformation by supporting manufacturers and cold chain operators as they modernise operations, without them having to tie up capital.
With Hilton Foods, it is building a partnership model designed for this environment: close collaboration, flexible funding, and a clear focus on operational outcomes.
“When businesses can invest in the right equipment at the right time, they stay competitive and continue to grow,” Austen says.
For Austen, there are four forces driving the next wave of capex decisions – automation and robotics, digitalisation, sustainability, and more cold chain modernisation.
“There is a huge expectation on freshness, safety, and traceability across the supply chain, particularly in the food space,” he says.
For finance partners, that shift in manufacturing priorities matters because it changes what manufacturers need to buy, and how quickly. It’s no longer just like-for-like replacement. It’s robotics to address labour constraints, systems that generate usable data, energy and refrigeration upgrades to reduce operating costs, and cold chain investments to strengthen traceability and food-safety performance end-to-end.
Investment strategy
Hilton Foods sits at the centre of a high-volume, high-complexity protein operation, where a small change at shelf can trigger a meaningful change on the factory floor.
APAC financial controller, David Kopitschinski, says, “We operate three facilities in Australia, one in Bunbury, Western Australia, one in Truganina, Victoria and one in Heathwood, Queensland. Via those facilities we process, pack and distribute protein products to more than 1000 Woolworths stores.”
The scale is significant with more than 165,000 tonnes of meat-based protein products being processed through the sites as well as additional volume through distribution.
That scale shapes Hilton’s investment approach – upgrades must deliver measurable outcomes across yield, efficiency, labour, packaging performance, compliance and cost-to-serve.
And increasingly, those upgrades must support retail strategies designed to protect value perception for shoppers under sustained cost pressure.
“We’re seeing trends in the market for smaller pack sizes and more value adding in the production process,” he says.
That shift has operational consequences – more Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), more configuration, and a tighter need for packaging, labelling, and line flexibility – which Hilton responds to with a blend of planned investment and rapid adaptation.
“Sometimes we can modify existing equipment, other times it’s a new piece of equipment installed into the line. Managing timeline expectations and costs drive the decision making.”
Close collaboration
Both organisations describe the partnership as practical and execution-focused, built around Hilton’s investment program and the funding structures needed to deliver it.
From Hilton’s perspective, speed and administrative simplicity matter, particularly when capital projects are moving through multiple sites and tight implementation windows.
Kopitschinski says establishing a funding facility with DLL has been efficient, administratively friendly, and not onerous. For DLL, the local partnership is underpinned by a broader relationship.
Austen says, “As an organisation, DLL and Rabobank have a global relationship with Hilton. When I did my review on the local business and its scale, I realised its level of advanced automation compared to many of its competitors.
“In terms of growth, there is definitely a strategic growth mindset within that business that would allow a partner like DLL to grow with them.”
Shaping priorities
The partnership is forming at a time when manufacturers are balancing rising compliance and sustainability expectations, reporting requirements with tight retail price points, and commodity volatility that sits largely outside of a processor’s control.
Kopitschinski agrees. “Beef is very much a commodity, with prices globally driven. Many people would be surprised at the percentage of Australian beef being exported and it’s that market that drives the beef prices.”
At the same time, energy and water have become board-level operating variables, pushing sustainability from a long-term ambition into a near-term operational discipline.
“Sustainability has been a relevant aspect of our strategy for quite a while. Some of it is driven by regulation, and some driven by cost.
“Energy prices have gone through some extraordinary increases in recent years, so from a cost management point of view, we’re looking for more energy efficient ways of running our facilities and water as well,” he says.
For DLL, that combination – energy economics plus regulatory pressure – is translating directly into asset replacement and upgrades across customers of all sizes.
“The cost of energy is a huge focus for all my customers. So that’s the transition to more energy efficient assets, including solar and battery storage,” Austen says.
Both companies treat sustainability as an operational system: energy efficiency, resource management, compliance readiness, and investment decisions that deliver measurable performance improvements.
For Hilton Foods, sustainability intersects directly with the cost base, retailer expectations and reporting obligations. For DLL, it shapes the asset mix and urgency of replacement cycles, particularly where older equipment is energy-intensive or no longer fit for modern compliance and traceability expectations.
The result is a pragmatic, outcomes-based approach: upgrades that reduce waste, improve yield, cut energy consumption, and support packaging changes that align with recyclability and retailer sustainability commitments.
In high-volume protein processing, marginal gains can be material, especially as input costs rise. Hilton’s investment roadmap is designed to capture those gains.
“There is significant investment planned to continue to drive efficiency through value chain, including new slicing lanes to reduce wastage and increase yield,” Kopitschinski says.
“Technology advances in ways that allow us to extract an extra half a per cent of sliced beef – that half a per cent is worth a lot of money on the scale we’re operating at. Every half a per cent is becoming more valuable to our customer, the supply chain and the consumer,” he adds.
Packaging is another major focus, with projects spanning configuration, materials and recyclability. There is a capital plan around packaging configurations that align with Hilton’s sustainability targets to reduce plastic and increase recyclability.
“We’ve been on that path for a while and it’s one we are not at the end of yet,” he says.
Austen says these projects align with the kinds of assets DLL is designed to fund across the sector, from packaging and production lines through to refrigeration and warehouse automation.
“If there was movement into robotic assets, production lines, or packaging and refrigeration, it’s the type of asset class that DLL would be comfortable supporting and wanting to help Hilton grow,” Austen says.
What’s next mindset
While both organisations describe the local partnership as relatively new, the pipeline is clearly defined and anchored in projects already being implemented on site.
“The next stage is the slicing upgrades I mentioned earlier, and new packaging equipment we are currently commissioning that we will be presenting to DLL for funding support shortly.
“It’s in its final stages at one of our sites, and once we’ve completed the implementation across all sites, we’ll be having discussions with DLL to refinance that investment,” Kopitschinski says.
Hilton’s decision rule is straightforward – and familiar to manufacturers facing constant change – “We upgrade our equipment when we think it’s got got a return basically,” Kopitschinski says.
For DLL, that return-on-investment mindset, combined with Hilton’s scale and ongoing upgrade cadence, is exactly what a long-term partnership is built to support: flexible finance that keeps capital available, accelerates modernisation, and helps fund the next wave of efficiency and sustainability improvements.
For the broader industry, it’s a case study in how Australia’s largest manufacturers are responding to a new reality: shoppers want stability, retailers want sharper value and stronger sustainability outcomes, regulators want better reporting, and supply chains need to be faster, safer and more transparent – all without losing sight of the fundamental economics of production.
Finance is provided by De Lage Landen Pty Limited (ABN 20 101 692 040) (DLL). Equipment to be used for business purposes only. Subject to DLL’s standard credit criteria, fees and terms and conditions apply.
This article first appeared in the Q1 2026 edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.
