From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

As of 2007, the growers were producing crops from
these seed potatoes to their great advantage: yields had
doubled, yet they were using only one-third as much
water as before. This was the result of irrigation technology
McCain introduced to replace flood irrigation, the
inefficient and wasteful method previously used. The
Gujarat farmers are eager to learn all they can. When
McCain announces a seminar on some potato-growing
topic, several hundred farmers inevitably show up.
It’s expected that the Gujarat area can reliably produce
potatoes from irrigated fields every year. Although
it is dry during the growing season, the monsoon rains
during the summer ensure there is plenty of underground
water to use for irrigation.
McCain has also investigated the possibilities in the
Middle East. In the late 1990s, McCain considered building
a factory there to supply McDonald’s restaurants in
Israel and Jordan. It would have been a joint venture with
an Israeli company that was processing french fries for
McDonald’s. Israel has a highly developed agricultural
sector and grows good potatoes. However, the market
potential is not great enough to offset major risks in the
region, including water shortages, political instability,
and the ever-present possibility of war.
tOP: Agriculture manager Devendra Kumar (in striped shirt) with
Gujarati farmers and the McCain-designed flatbed planter, which
can plant 3.2 hectares a day. A traditional planter can plant only
1.2 hectares.
MIddlE: Harvesting in Pune, July 2001.
BOttOM: Pune farmer, 2002.
“Join the army, see the world” was a famous recruiting slogan
used by the U.S. military. “Join McCain, see the world” might be
almost as appropriate.
Because it is a global company, McCain attracts people who
want to experience living in other countries. “McCain people loved
going to South Africa,” Mark McCain recalls. “You could work in
a young, charged company that was embracing change, and on the
weekend you could tour a game farm. There wasn’t anyone that we
asked to go for a week or three months who didn’t want to go.”
Dan Leger, from Florenceville, went to South Africa and stayed.
He married a South African woman, developed a South African
accent, and has had family members, some of whom had never
left New Brunswick before, come to visit.
Ian Robinson left Britain to be plant manager in Hoofddorp, in the Netherlands.
Then he moved to Poland as the first plant manager of the new McCain factory there.
Next stop was Delmas, South Africa, where he managed the french fry plant. He then
spent some time back home in Britain before moving to China to manage McCain’s
plant in Harbin.
Perhaps the best-travelled McCain employee is Kai Bockmann, managing director
for China, whose travels began long before he joined the company. When he was seven,
attending grade school in Vancouver, his parents decided his education wasn’t broad
enough. So they bought a camper and hit the road. They soon ditched the camper and
spent the next six years hitchhiking around the world, through 120 countries.
After university, Bockmann joined the Canadian foreign affairs department and
was assigned to Colombia. In 1996, while on vacation in Vancouver, he got a call from
McCain Foods, which was looking for a Spanish speaker with knowledge of Latin
America. He met with Terry Bird in Florenceville the next day and joined McCain’s
corporate development department. On his first day on the job, Bird told him: “You’re
going to Chile tomorrow. I want you to go there for a month, visit all the frozen food
companies, do a feasibility study, identify acquisition targets, and come back with
your recommendations.”
For someone who had been working in a government bureaucracy, McCain was
a culture shock. “I came from foreign affairs, where you’ve got a manual on how to
fill out an expense report, to an environment where you’re expected to learn by doing.
There was no training program. I didn’t even know what McCain was making
at that time other than french fries. I was only twenty-six. Yet on the second day on
216 From the GrouN d up
New w orlds to CoN quer 217
Employees of McCain
International and McDonald’s
visit the Coaldale, Alberta,
plant 2001.
Front row: (left to right) Mark
MacPhail, Emmanuel Araya.
Back row: Richard Bartlett;
Lisa Yee, McDonald’s Central
America; Alvaro Cofino,
McDonald’s Guatemala;
Marco Gordon, McDonald’s
Guatemala; Paul Tol.