From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

McCain helps feed mourners
at a South African funeral.
feasts. It’s very traditional. The women in the family spend the week before the event
preparing the food. That’s where McCain comes in.”
A company team will arrive at the home of the deceased early on the morning
of the funeral to pitch a tent displaying the black-and-yellow McCain logo. McCain
provides cups and cutlery as well as frozen vegetables for the meal. Not only does the
family benefit, but the women from the local community who help out are spared
hours of peeling and cooking vegetables.
It’s a more persuasive way of getting the McCain message out to the public
than a TV ad. “We’re a new brand and we need to get involved in the community,”
says Partner. “International visitors think it’s rude to be promoting at a funeral,
but in South African culture that’s not the case. It’s almost like a nod that
you’ve made it if you’ve got McCain participating at your wedding or funeral or
tombstone unveiling. It allows us to demonstrate how well our product fits into
people’s lives.”
Owen Porteus, an Australian who came to South Africa on a temporary assignment
and wound up staying on as managing director, was at first taken aback by the
idea: “If anybody had told me I would be in the funeral business, I would have said,
‘You’re crazy.’ But culture isn’t so simple.”
The only way to prove that McCain vegetables are not the off-cuts of fresh vegetables
was to get people to try them. “We had to do one-on-one communication,”
explains Partner. “We go into the townships and we have tea parties. We’ll get a hostess
to invite twenty of her friends on a Saturday afternoon, and then we’ll go in and
do a cook-up. And we’ll allow the consumers to cook and eat the product.
“We go to the schools as well, where we have junior chef competitions. The kids
come up with recipes and menus using our product and they do a cook-up. We had
the finals on national TV.”
In addition, McCain gives potato flakes (dehydrated potatoes that can be reconstituted
into mashed potatoes) and vegetables to charities that together provide seventy
thousand free meals a month to needy children. The McCain products are combined
with main dishes to make complete meals.
A good place to catch consumers in a good mood is on the beach during one of
South Africa’s many statutory holidays. One campaign featured a huge chip truck decorated
with billboards displaying well-shaped young bodies. The point, says Partner,
was that “you can be very healthy and have beautiful bodies if you eat oven-baked
chips.” (In South Africa, as in Britain and Australia, french fries are called chips.)
“We hit the beaches during the day. People who work for us who have magnificent
bodies walk on the beaches serving chips. At night we go into the clubs and have our
djs promoting the product, giving away McCain T-shirts and beach balls.”
McCain’s success in South Africa is a textbook example both of the “drink the
local wine” philosophy and of how the company can benefit from leveraging its
global strength. McCain experts in agriculture, information technology, engineering,
production, sales, and finance came from Canada, Britain, Australia, and the
Netherlands. Some stayed in South Africa for a few weeks, others for a few years. And
they got McCain South Africa off to a flying start.
The groundwork for McCain’s South African venture was laid in the mid-1990s
when George McClure’s corporate development team was looking at several countries
as possible sites for expansion. After some discussion in the department, Mark
McCain, one of the corporate development executives at the time, was assigned South
Africa as the country he would study.
It was an exciting time to go to South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been freed from
prison in 1990, becoming the country’s first democratically elected president in 1994.
188 From the GrouN d up
New w orlds to CoN quer 189
McCain is a major contributor
to school lunch programs in
South Africa.