From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

A.D. McCain and McCain Produce
It was natural, Harrison McCain said, that he and his brothers
would earn their livings in the potato business. “Our
father was a potato dealer and a farmer. Our grandfather was
a farmer. Our great-grandfather was a farmer and a landclearer.
He saw a piece of woods, cleared a farm, and started
growing potatoes.”
Clearing land was back-breaking labour – chopping down
pine trees and burning the stumps. Farming too was hard
work, but hard work alone wasn’t enough. Success in farming
also required good business skills.
Harrison and Wallace McCain always said they knew
nothing about the frozen food business when they started
McCain Foods in 1957. But they had grown up immersed in a
world of agriculture and business. As for hard work, that was
a way of life in the McCain family.
Wallace and Harrison were the two youngest of Andrew
and Laura McCain’s six children. In 1909, Andrew, known by
his initials A.D., started a potato export company, McCain
Produce, in partnership with his father to export seed potatoes.
When the Americans placed high tariffs on potatoes,
A.D. McCain travelled to the Caribbean and South America
to find new markets. He also proved to be a shrewd investor,
amassing a small fortune in the stock market, as well as
extensive landholdings in Carleton County.
When A.D. McCain died in 1953, his widow Laura (“Mrs.
A.D.”), who had been a school teacher before her marriage and
then a homemaker, took over the family business. “Dad never
talked business at home,” Wallace McCain recalls. “After he died,
my mother ran McCain Produce. Andrew and Bob, my brothers,
worked for Mother. She had no business experience, and
yet she made more money than Dad did in the stock market.”
Andrew, the eldest of the McCain brothers, became president
of McCain Produce, developing new markets for the company
in the Mediterranean countries of Europe and North Africa.
Agricultural industries are marked by boom and bust
cycles as food prices rise and fall. Consequently, McCain
Produce would make money one year and lose the next
– one reason Laura McCain did not want all her sons to continue
in the produce business and why A.D. McCain insisted
they attend university. It also led to Bob McCain’s interest
in the more stable processing side of the food business,
prompting him to suggest to his brothers that they start
a frozen foods factory.
As of 2007, Stephen McCain, a son of Harrison and
Wallace’s brother Andrew, and Vernon Thomas were
co-managing directors of McCain Produce. They have had
to contend with a major challenge: the nations of South
America, Europe, and North Africa have banned the importation
of North American potatoes. The official reason is to
prevent the spread of plant diseases. In response, Stephen
McCain and Thomas have successfully repositioned McCain
Produce’s business by developing new markets for table
potatoes and plant protection materials.
Stephen McCain is also chairman of McCain Fertilizer,
which operates factories in New Brunswick, Prince Edward
Island, and Maine.
TOP LEFT: McCain Produce potatoes are loaded onto a ship
in Saint John, New Brunswick.
ABOVE: A McCain Produce building in Florenceville. Seed
potatoes stored here are shipped to international markets.
New Brunswick potatoes were being shipped to Maine, where they were processed
as french fries, frozen, and packaged. Canadian peas were also being frozen in the
United States. Why not freeze Canadian potatoes and peas in Canada?
The brothers, who had been close since childhood, were intrigued by the idea.
Neither knew anything about freezing food, a technology then in its infancy. On the
other hand, they were no strangers to the food business. The McCain family had been
involved in agriculture, in one way or another, since it had first arrived in Canada
from Ireland in 1825. Harrison and Wallace had grown up in Florenceville, a farming
community. As boys, each had his own cow to milk before going to school.
Before working for Thorne’s, Wallace had sold insecticides and fertilizers for Green
Cross, a job that required him to travel around the Maritime provinces calling on
farmers. “I learned more about agriculture doing that than I had at home,” he says. “I
sold fungicides for potatoes, so I learned a little about potatoes.”
The more the brothers found out about frozen food, the more interested they became.
They liked the notion of being innovators in a new branch of food processing.
It seemed like the right idea at the right time. Within a month, they had decided to
build a factory to freeze potatoes and other vegetables. And they decided to do it
where the raw materials were located, in their hometown of Florenceville.
That was the beginning of McCain Foods Ltd. On February 23, 1957, the plant
opened on what had been a cow pasture on the shore of the Saint John River. Every
hour, the new factory, with thirty workers, produced almost seven hundred kilograms
of frozen produce. Total sales that first year were $153,000.
By 2007, as McCain Foods prepared to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, annual sales
were around $6 billion, with 77 percent of those sales outside Canada. The company
2 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 3
LEFT: The McCain plant, on
the left bank of the Saint John
River, dwarfs the village of
Florenceville, 1981. The village
is clustered around a bridge
downriver; Harrison and
Wallace’s houses are on the
right bank of the river.
RIGHT: Florenceville’s famous
partially covered bridge,
spanning the Saint John River.