From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

CHAPTER SEVEN
New worlds to CoNquer
It’s not easy to sell frozen vegetables if most of your potential customers think
frozen vegetables are the less desirable parts left over after fresh vegetables have
been prepared.
That was just one of the problems McCain Foods had to deal with when it began
doing business in South Africa in 2001. Another was that 30 percent of South
Africans live in communities without electricity, so they can’t operate freezers even if
they could afford them.
These were problems McCain had never before encountered in four decades of
expanding from its Canadian base to the rest of the world. What to do? What McCain
has always done – drink the local wine.
Drinking the local wine means understanding and adapting to the circumstances
of the market you are trying to enter. In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
McCain is getting established in South Africa, India, China, and many other countries
where cultural practices, including culinary ones, differ from those in North
America and Europe. The objective is to get the local people to accept McCain as one
of their own rather than view it as a foreign intruder.
One way to do that in South Africa, McCain discovered, was to offer free samples
of McCain products at funerals. While this would be a poor marketing strategy in
North America or Europe, it works brilliantly in South Africa. “The black community
makes a huge thing of funerals,” explains marketing director Heather Partner, who
has played a pivotal role in introducing McCain to South Africa, a developing country
of forty-four million people. She points out that as many as two thousand people
might show up at a funeral in a black community such as Soweto. The bereaved family
is expected to feed its guests, putting a major strain on its finances. “They prepare
New w orlds to CoN quer
FACING PAGE: Sharon
Kamfer at broccoli harvest
time in South Africa.
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