From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

lEFt: Dave Morgan with
Japanese colleagues at a
food expo sampling booth in
Tokyo, 1998.
RIGHt: Carl Morris (left)
launched and managed
McCain’s Japan business; here
in 1996 with George Suzuki,
national sales manager for
Japan, and Yon Yamaguchi,
country manager.
One day in 1974, Wallace McCain called David Morgan, a veteran McCain employee
who was working at production planning in the Florenceville plant. He said, “David,
I’ve got a customer I want you to look after. He calls most every day, and I want you
to look after him.”
The customer worked for Nichirei, a Japanese food distributor. Wallace McCain
had made contact with Nichirei during a trip to Japan as part of a Canadian trade
mission. The distributor had already sold one container of retail product, and it was
obvious that this was a promising opportunity for McCain.
Japan had emerged from wartime devastation to become, by the mid-1970s, an
important industrial power. It was a populous, wealthy country and getting wealthier
all the time. The Japanese are traditionally rice eaters, not potato eaters, but they were
receptive to Western influences, and the American fast food chains were beginning
to make inroads. So David Morgan became the scheduler for exports to Japan and
Korea, with Nichirei continuing as McCain’s agent in Japan.
Because many of the boxes in that first shipment had arrived broken, Wallace decided
he needed a trusted employee on the spot to look after this potentially lucrative
new business. Carl Morris, looking for a change after many years on the production
side, got the assignment and made the first of many day-long trips from Florenceville
to Tokyo. From 1974 to 1989, he made two to five trips per year. From 1989 to 1994, he
spent six months of each year based in Tokyo, as president of McCain Japan.
It soon became apparent that the Japanese market deserved a full-time McCain
presence, so Morris hired Yon Yamaguchi, a Japanese who had lived in Canada for
twelve years, to head the Tokyo office. Morgan, in Florenceville, reported to Morris
as export manager.
A South Korean office was opened in Seoul in 1990, with Mike Cho as country
manager, a position he still held in 2007. By 1995, McCain had fifty full-time employees
in Japan, most based in Tokyo, with a few in Osaka. McCain employees tend
to stay McCain employees, which turned out to be a major competitive advantage
for McCain – the other foreign companies competing with McCain in the Japanese
market tended to have rapid turnover among their sales representatives. “There
would be different people every two years representing a company,” says Morris. “It
got to the point where some of my customers told me they had been visited in the
same year by the same person representing two different companies.”
It’s common for a Japanese to remain with one company throughout his or her
working career, and Morris found that his Japanese customers were favourably impressed
that the McCain representatives stayed put. “It showed them that we were
there to stay.” In addition, the Japanese tend to have a positive attitude toward Canada.
“The average Japanese thinks of the United States as smokestacks in Pittsburgh. When
he thinks of Canada, he thinks of clean air and Niagara Falls.”
Although the big U.S. fast food chains are present, the main business for McCain in
Japan has turned out to be what Morris calls “street business” – restaurants other than
the quick-service chains. Japan has thousands upon thousands of restaurants, many of
them tiny. They don’t have much room for storing frozen products, so the wholesaler
distributing McCain french fries often makes daily or twice-daily deliveries.
“It’s a tough market,” says Morris, “though a lot of people think it’s a lot tougher
than it is. Most people hear about all the difficulties of entering Japan. And it is very
difficult to do it by telephone and emails if you don’t speak the language. You have to
go there. A lot of companies haven’t done that, so they say it’s difficult.”
208 From the GrouN d up
New w orlds to CoN quer 209
lEFt: McCain’s Japan team,
2006.
RIGHt: McCain’s Taiwan
team, 2006.