From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

tOP lEFt: Harrison, Balcarce
mayor Jose Luis Perez, and
Stephen McCain at the
opening of the Argentina
plant, 1995.
tOP RIGHt: Potato trial field
across the road from McCain’s
Balcarce factory.
BOttOM: Argentina
president Carlos Menem
presents an export award to
Adolfo Lopez Rouger, CEO of
McCain South America, 2002.
Getting the growers to produce good raw materials for the factory was not easy.
They were used to getting paid by the bag without the bag being weighed. But McCain
used a scale, reducing the payout for soil and for low-quality potatoes. The price for
good potatoes remained the same, but the amount of soil was now deducted from the
total weight and a lesser amount was paid for potatoes that didn’t meet the quality
standards specified in the contract.
“It was quite a learning experience for growers to adapt to the higher standards
we had,” says Pelletier. On the other hand, growers selling to the fresh market in
Argentina often had trouble getting paid. “Part of their costs was all the phone calls
they had to make to get a cheque. At McCain, once your crop is accepted at the factory,
you knew you would get your money.”
The McCain name was already known to many of the growers, as Van Leersum
discovered when he visited some of them during construction of the Balcarce plant.
“I found potato bags with the McCain Produce logo that they had saved from imports
from Canada in the 1970s,” he recalls. In those days, the growers imported
Canadian seed or table potatoes from McCain Produce when their own crops were
small and local potato prices were high. They exported in good years, partly to reduce
the local supply and influence the domestic price upward.
When McCain launched its Balcarce operation, potatoes in the region were still
harvested by hand, the potatoes dumped in pyramidal piles in the field and covered
with stalks of corn that were grown in strips in between the potatoes for that purpose.
None of the growers had climate-controlled indoor storage.
The supply from the fields came in fifty-kilogram jute bags on flatbed trucks. Each
bag had to be emptied onto a conveyer belt, to be transferred to McCain’s storage
buildings at the factory. McCain employed seventy-five workers to do this job, day and
night. Since then, specialized transport and unloading systems have been developed.
The Balcarce factory, which supplies both Argentina and Brazil and neighbouring
countries, including Chile and Uruguay, is one of the biggest in the McCain network.
As well as relying on local farmers for supply, McCain has developed twenty-four
circles of fifty hectares each on a farm of twenty-three thousand hectares. It grows
potatoes there in a four-year rotation. The farm is located in Patagonia, where the climate
is better suited for growing and long-term storage of Russet Burbank potatoes.
McCain, with Gustavo Scioli as director of agriculture, also grows potatoes on leased
land in the Balcarce area.
Andrew Green, an engineer from Florenceville, came from Canada to be project
manager for the construction of the Balcarce plant. His most vivid recollection is of
his encounter with a troublesome Argentinian cat. When the construction was almost
finished, McDonald’s, whose presence in South America was McCain’s reason for
building the factory, announced it was sending representatives for an inspection tour.
Green decided it was time to get rid of a cat that had taken up residence on the site.
“I kept telling the guys to get rid of that cat, but they couldn’t catch it. One day
I was walking through the factory and right in front of me I saw this nice little cat
nobody could catch. I walked gently up behind it and grabbed it around its body for
fear it would scamper off.
“Apparently cats in Argentina are part cat, part mountain lion. The cat spun around
in my hands and attacked me. But I did not want to let go because McDonald’s
was coming. After the cat had shredded my hands and had a fang embedded in
my knuckle, I decided maybe McDonald’s would understand that sometimes cats
200 From the GrouN d up
New w orlds to CoN quer 201
lEFt: Enrique Sanchez
Acosta, managing director of
McCain Argentina (far right)
with McCain production
employees, at the start-up of
Balcarce’s second flake drum.
RIGHt: The second flake
drum at Balcarce.