From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Manual harvesting and
bagging seed potatoes in
a field near Balcarce.
certain level of water content, you irrigate,” explains Pelletier. “That was my apprenticeship
in the science of irrigation.”
From Nebraska, Pelletier moved on to Othello, Washington, where McCain did
have a factory. One day, he received a phone call from Wallace. He said, “Ghislain,
when you and I talked last year, you told me you wanted to see the world. Well, I have
something for you today.”
Pelletier asked, “Where?”
Wallace replied, “Argentina. You talk to your wife tonight and give me a call tomorrow.”
Pelletier, eager for travel, accepted the assignment. His task would be to report
on where McCain should locate a South American plant. First, Pelletier went to
Florenceville to be briefed by Bob Coston, an executive who had been hired from
Nestlé to manage the South America program in its initial stages, and by Tony van
Leersum, who had years of experience in South America. Then the Pelletier family,
with eleven suitcases and a couple of Spanish dictionaries, left for Argentina.
He wasn’t the first McCain employee to explore South America. George
McClure had investigated the business and economic environment of the continent,
assisted by Don Young, who looked at the agricultural side. Also, McCain
Produce for some years had barter arrangements with South American companies
in which it exchanged seed potatoes for fresh fruit and vegetables. As for Van
Leersum, he had travelled there on sales trips when working for a Dutch company
before joining McCain. He was acquainted with some South American growers,
including the largest farm co-operative in Brazil. Both Van Leersum and McCain
agronomist Han van den Hoek had made many trips to Brazil and Argentina to
help McDonald’s obtain better fresh potatoes when the chain was still producing
fries in its restaurants.
The issue for McCain was which of the two major markets in South America to
choose as the site for a plant: Brazil or Argentina. McDonald’s favoured Brazil because
it has more customers – a population of 180 million, compared with Argentina’s
40 million. The consensus of McCain’s experts, including Pelletier, was that Brazil is
a better place for growing oranges than potatoes. The climate is too hot for potatoes,
there are more pests, and the yields aren’t as good as those of Argentina, which has
better soil conditions and cooler nights.
McCain settled on Balcarce, a city of forty thousand people about five hundred
kilometres south of Buenos Aires, as the site for its new plant. Not only is Balcarce on
the outer circle of the area Pelletier had identified as good potato-growing country,
it has an agriculture faculty. “The city is home to many agronomists,” says Pelletier.
“Even the mayor is an agronomist.”
Pelletier hired local talent to work on McCain’s agricultural program, which involved
visiting growers and persuading them to grow good processing potatoes.
Gustavo Scioli, one of the agronomists hired, was the son of a local grower.
The most popular locally grown variety was the Spunta, a high-yielding table potato
that isn’t much good for processing. “It’s a bag of water,” says Pelletier. He encouraged
the farmers to grow the Shepody and Russet Burbank varieties and ran trials
with the help of the local research station. Then he began recruiting growers to work
with McCain. By the time he left, in 1996, McCain was processing the second crop in
its new factory. The first year, McCain bought twenty thousand metric tons of local
potatoes and, in the second year, twice that amount.
198 From the GrouN d up
New w orlds to CoN quer 199
tOP lEFt: Unloading fiftykilogram
bags of potatoes at
the Balcarce plant during the
Argentina plant’s early years.
tOP RIGHt: Bulk body trucks
are now used to transport
potatoes from the fields to
the storage facilities.
BOttOM: Grower Sergio
Scioli and Ghislain Pelletier,
1995.