From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Harrison and Wallace, 1988.
Young: “My industry can be nothing and go nowhere
without the farmers. And your industry
can be nothing and go nowhere without the fishermen.
So if you don’t feel it in your heart to try to
treat the fishermen with respect, then you’re in the
wrong industry. You’ve got to find a way to keep
that relationship of respect.”
Young concludes: “Harrison and Wallace were
great marketers and producers, but they never forgot
that they had to treat the primary producers
of the potato with the respect they deserved, and
I think that was why they were so successful. Lots
of people can be entrepreneurial and brilliant, but
if one of their core values is not treating people at
all levels – customer, employee, or farmer – with
respect, then they won’t build a $6 billion international
company.”
Both brothers knew that people, not nuts and
bolts, were their greatest asset. They were tough
bosses, yet they inspired loyalty. Many key managers and other employees stayed
with the company for decades, in the process accumulating priceless knowledge
which they then distributed to McCain operations throughout the world.
In an interview, Harrison McCain said that, while seeing McCain grow into the
world’s largest french fry manufacturer was satisfying, “I think the thing I’m most
proud of is seeing young people rise to the top of the ladder and develop into top
McCain executives.”
Although the company grew too large for the brothers to know everyone, they did
know hundreds of employees by name. “Even in 1990 when they employed around
twelve thousand people, they would walk up to workers at the various factories and
ask them about their children,” recalls Bruce Terry, former CFO.
Jim Evans, a long-time employee whose main contact of the two brothers was
with Wallace McCain, concurs that strong employee relations were fundamental to
McCain’s success. “You had a distinct feeling that you were part of the organization,
of the family. It was different from other companies and that was because of the personal
contact with the owners. You were treated as a person, often as a friend.”
Everyone who worked with Harrison and Wallace during the first three decades of
McCain Foods remembers them in their adjacent
offices calling out to each other through
the open door between the two rooms. Later,
to everyone’s chagrin, the door was shut because
of the break between the brothers.
In later years, the brotherly affection reasserted
itself. In his eulogy at Harrison McCain’s
funeral in 2004, then New Brunswick premier
Frank McKenna recalled his amazement, the
previous Christmas, at being invited to vacation
with Harrison. When McKenna asked
where, Harrison replied, “We’re staying at
Wallace’s down in Jamaica.” McKenna told
the mourners that the pair had “left their
business differences aside … Harrison and
Wallace talked or visited each other almost
on a daily basis.”
In 1957, Harrison and Wallace decided to
make a product, french fries, that almost everyone
likes, and they found a better way of doing it. That, plus good timing, good
luck, and incredibly hard work, made McCain Foods a huge success. A measure of
that phenomenal success was that, fifty years after McCain Foods was founded at one
small factory in the rural village of Florenceville, a New York consulting firm, the
Reputation Institute, named it one of the world’s most respected companies.
In March 2007, Harrison and Wallace McCain were chosen as the greatest Canadian
entrepreneurs ever in an online poll conducted by Roynat Capital. They finished ahead
of a long list of business giants, including Jim Pattison, K.C. Irving, Ken Thomson,
Alexander Graham Bell, Frank Stronach, and Joseph-Armand Bombardier. The
McCain brothers were both proud men, but they never overestimated themselves.
“We didn’t know anything about the business in 1957,” Harrison told an interviewer.
“We had to live and learn just the same as everybody else.”
They had great capacity for enjoyment, of work, and of life. Repeating himself as
he always did, Harrison told another interviewer in 2001, “We’ve had a pretty good
run, we’ve had a pretty good run.”
Adds Wallace: “We had a lot of fun. Raised a lot of hell.”
236 f rom T he ground uP
a world of change 237
Harrison at his front door,
Christmas 2000.