From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Dale Morrison exchanges
ideas with Don Butterfield
(left), Murray Holmes, and
Michel Lacroix at the Portage
la Prairie plant, which in
2006 won the McCain North
American MacFry Plant of
the Year award.
“The world is moving much faster today
than it was even ten years ago,” says Dale
Morrison, the company’s president and CEO,
and, he says, success in a changing world requires
perpetual renewal. Morrison insists
that all McCain employees understand this
essential fact: “If the rate of change outside a
company is faster than inside the company,
there is big trouble ahead.”
Morrison joined McCain as CEO in 2004,
the same year Harrison McCain died. He is
the second professional manager to head the
company and possibly one of the few executives
ever recruited to McCain Foods who
failed to be taken aback by the smallness of
Florenceville, New Brunswick. Perhaps that
is because Florenceville is three times bigger
than Milton, North Dakota, was when Morrison was growing up there. (The population
of this farming community has since shrunk from two hundred to eighty.) He
worked on his family’s farm, which produced barley, wheat, oats, and cattle. One
year, he harvested potatoes on another farm in the Red River Valley. The metropolis
of the region was north of the border – Winnipeg, a city Morrison then considered
monstrous in size. His high school graduating class consisted of thirteen people. “I
graduated in the top ten,” he boasts.
After obtaining a business degree from the University of North Dakota, Morrison
landed a job with General Foods in sales and marketing. Ten years later, he joined
PepsiCo, where he held a variety of positions, including CEO of Frito-Lay uk and
Toronto-based president of Frito-Lay for Canada and part of the United States. After
relocating seven times in fourteen years with PepsiCo, Morrison promised his family
their moving days were over and, in 1995, he accepted a job in Princeton, New Jersey,
with the Campbell Soup Company, first as head of Pepperidge Farms, the bakery
division, and then as CEO.
For his next job, Morrison decided he needed a change from the food business
and so joined a New York–based private equity company managing $1.6 billion in
investments. “I assumed it was the last job I would do,” he says. That was before he
received a call from a recruiter helping McCain in its search for a new CEO. The
search committee wanted to meet Morrison. One of the committee members was
Wallace McCain.
Morrison had turned down several job opportunities since leaving Campbell. He
didn’t want a new job, but he did want to meet Wallace McCain. He thought, “I’m
not going to do this, but how many chances do you get to meet somebody who has
helped create a $6 billion company? It’s like getting a chance to meet Sam Walton [the
founder of Wal-Mart].”
After a series of meetings with the committee and members of the board, Morrison
was no longer sure that he wasn’t interested. “While it may not seem totally logical
or rational, there are times in life when you run into a career opportunity and you
conclude that it is the perfect fit for you. That was the case for me with McCain; I
concluded that the company was right for me. I liked the family and the board, I
liked the governance structure, and, most importantly, I felt I could really embrace
and build on the McCain culture and the McCain business. It seemed to be the best
of two worlds: a private company with a corporate governance structure close to that
of a public company.”
Morrison says his job is similar to that of a public company CEO reporting to a
“progressive, contemporary board.” While he doesn’t have to answer to Bay Street
analysts, he does have to answer to the family. “That’s really the only difference.
Having run a public company and now running McCain, I feel as much weight with
twenty-four shareholders as I did with thousands of shareholders. I would say I feel
the weight even more because I know the shareholders personally.”
Morrison says, “We build on the shoulders of those who came before us. We have
such a solid foundation to build on.” The first fifty years of McCain Foods were more
about keeping up with demand. But, since then, the marketplace in which McCain
operates has evolved, and, in the twenty-first century, the company must focus more
on creating demand.
In 1957, the newborn McCain Foods had perfect timing. The Canadian, U.S. and
Australian baby booms all started in the 1940s after the war, and women were flocking
into the workforce. This combination of rapid population growth and greater need for
convenience translated into steadily increasing demand for McCain’s products. At the
same time, the technology for a frozen food industry was being perfected and the fast
food industry was just beginning. For years, McCain was able to grow at rates of 10 to
15 percent per year simply by responding to ever rising demand created naturally by
the social and economic environment. Wallace McCain used to tell new recruits: “This
train is going to fly by, and your job is to grab it and hold on for the ride.”
226 f rom T he ground uP
a world of change 227
Today’s McCain logo
(second from the top) was
stylized from the original
McCain Produce logo (top).
The Russian logo (second
from bottom) is a phonetic
rendering in Cyrillic letters of
“McCain.” At the bottom is the
Chinese version; the English
transliteration of the Chinese
characters is “Mei Kang,”
meaning “perfect health.”