From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

ToP: Paul Tellier, an Opco
board member since 1996.
boTTom: Victor Young, an
Opco board member since
1992.
McCain, chairman of Opco, agrees, adding that the consistent long-term commitment
underpins the strategy going forward.
In his 2006 webcast to McCain employees all over the world, Dale Morrison emphasized
that McCain is a values-driven company: “We believe in honesty, integrity, and fair
dealing, and we believe they’re integral to our success. Harrison said it: ‘Good ethics is
good business.’ We are multicultural and care about our people, our families, and the
communities we operate in. We take pride in being a family business.
“We value continuous improvement in our people, our products, in our business.
That’s how we win long term. We cherish the can-do spirit. Trying but failing is okay,
but failing to try is not okay.
“We dare to be different – new ideas, innovation, and differentiation matter.”
Just as the values of Harrison and Wallace McCain remain in place, so does the
tradition of a lean management structure. Given its current size and growth ambitions,
the company is focused on disciplined global management, which is vital to
ensure that risks are well identified and managed and that it gains an advantage from
the ideas and efficiencies generated through its global scale. Nevertheless, McCain
Foods is both leaner and quicker than most companies of its size.
Paul Tellier, a veteran McCain Opco board member, marvelled at Harrison’s unpretentious
style. Tellier knows how large corporations work because he was CEO and
president of both CN Rail and Bombardier. Unlike the heads of most corporations
the size of McCain, Harrison McCain did not travel with a team of assistants. Tellier
recalls attending a McCain board meeting in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “There is a lake
there, and one evening we were going to have dinner on a boat. I came out of the
board meeting and heard Harrison himself on the phone checking about the dinner
reservations. Here was the chairman of the board who owns a third of the stock,
checking on restaurant reservations.”
Conventional wisdom has it that Harrison was the visionary while Wallace was
the nuts-and-bolts mechanic who made sure things worked. Tellier doesn’t buy that.
“Wallace also had strong views about the long term, and Harrison was a very hands-on
manager. I remember that one day there was a request before the board for approving
capital expenditures for a cold storage. They started exchanging among themselves very
detailed accounts of other cold storages. Both of them knew the most minute details.”
Vic Young, another veteran board member, is the former chairman and CEO of
Fishery Products International (FPI) of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada’s largest
seafood harvesting and processing company. He says McCain Foods has been successful
for a simple reason: it was founded by two brilliant entrepreneurs. “They
were fabulous risk takers with gut instincts for doing business. And they understood
all of the potato business, including the farmers. Can you grow potatoes?
That’s where they always started: can you grow potatoes here? Then they understood
how to produce them.
“And their Canadian experience had shown them how to market it. If you review
financially the history of every country – they went in there for two, three, four
years and lost a bundle of money, but they understood that if they kept at it, they
would bring it around and have a successful business in the United Kingdom and the
Netherlands and France and all over the world. They just had a natural instinct for
doing business and making money.”
During a period of turmoil in the Atlantic fishing industry in the early 1990s, plant
workers and trawlermen staged frequent demonstrations outside Young’s office. The
fish were disappearing, FPI was laying off workers, and Young himself was the target
of the protestors’ anger. Harrison McCain saw a protest on the news one night and
called Young. They had a conversation Young has never forgotten. Harrison said, “I
know all these people are picking on you and I know they are saying all these things
about you and I know that your temptation is to push back, but just remember that
they are fighting for their livelihood. If you were in their position, you’d be doing
exactly the same thing. So even if everything they are saying about you is untrue, be
careful about pushing back.”
Then he compared the fishing industry to the potato-processing industry. McCain
has thirty-five hundred contract growers around the world, whose annual potato
production ranges from fifty metric tons to five thousand metric tons. Harrison told
234 f rom T he ground uP
a world of change 235
lEFT: Brian Ruff, Paul Dean,
Tony van Leersum, and
Ramesh Manoharan at the
Potato Processing Technology
Centre in Florenceville, 2006.
rIGhT: The Potato Processing
Technology Centre.
24%
27%
19%
20%
North America
Europe
All other
Employees
57%
Sales
53%
AbovE: These charts show
the geographical distribution
of McCain Foods Limited
employees and sales as
of 2006.