From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

TOP: Unloading barrels of
potatoes onto the production
line, 1957.
BOTTOm: Packing frozen
french fries into cartons
by hand.
FACING PAGE: In 1959,
McCain was producing frozen
potato patties, broccoli, and
peas. The middle photo shows
employees Frank Hickling and
Gene Bulmer receiving an order
of fresh broccoli; the truck bears
the old McCain Produce logo.
Flying doors were just part of the local colour at the
McCain Foods factory. Another feature were the hunters
and fishermen tramping through the factory with their
trophies to be stored in the public lockers the McCains
had included in the cold storage area in order to qualify
for the federal grant. But these were the least of the problems.
The brothers quickly realized that John Baxter, who
had cautioned against basing a potato-processing business
in New Brunswick, was right. “Our first products were
greasy, black fries,” Wallace says. “If there was such a thing
as Grade F, that was what we were producing. We had never
heard of sugar content in potatoes, or ACD [darkening
caused by a chemical reaction in some potatoes after they
have been cooked].”
The problem was simple: the local potatoes weren’t
good raw material for french fries. “We should have gone
west … even to Manitoba or Alberta,” Wallace says. “We
didn’t. We thought New Brunswick had the best potatoes
in the world, but it probably had the worst for processing.
The potato growers were growing good seed potatoes, but
the poorest you could imagine for processing into frozen
french fries.”
To make good french fries, you need a long potato consisting
of at least 20 percent solids – a potato such as the
Russet Burbank, a variety prominent in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, which produces
a long, crisp french fry. New Brunswick, with its short growing season, didn’t grow
the Russet Burbank, a long-season variety. Instead, farmers in the Saint John River
Valley and neighbouring Aroostook County in Maine grew round potatoes such as
the Kennebec and Katahdin. Easterners found these varieties tastier than the Russet
Burbank as table potatoes. But they are far from ideal for french fry processing because
of their round shape and lower solid content, which result in a short, moist,
or limp french fry. And the stony soil of New Brunswick is also less than perfect for
potato growing, since the stones can damage the potatoes during harvesting.
Not only were the potatoes less than ideal, but the farmers didn’t know how to
handle them properly. Potatoes produced for the fresh table and seed market – the
only market the growers knew – are stored at low temperatures to keep them firm
and prevent sprouting. But at low temperatures the potato transforms its
starches into sugar, which caramelizes when the potato is fried. This produces
a dark brown french fry. And consumers do not want dark brown
french fries; they want light golden ones. So the growers needed to be educated
on how to grow, store, and handle potatoes destined for processing.
In the beginning, McCain Foods had no choice but to do the best it
could with what farmers delivered to its plant. In the early 1960s, over
farmers’ protests, it introduced the Russet Burbank to New Brunswick. But
because of the shorter growing season, the potatoes were smaller than the
ones grown in Idaho.
Happily for McCain, Donald Young, a plant biologist and specialist
in potato variety breeding at the Agriculture Canada Research Centre in
Fredericton, was trying to develop a processing potato better suited for
the short eastern Canadian growing season. In 1983, he succeeded. The
new potato, called the Shepody, was a boon for McCain and has since become
one of the three most grown varieties in North America. Because of
McCain’s efforts, the Shepody is now grown around the world.
“Don made an enormous contribution to McCain Foods,” says Wallace,
“first through the Shepody variety, and later in a number of projects, from
teaching and guiding our global team of agronomists for many years,
to greatly improving yields in Manitoba and research in areas where we
planned to build.”
Since its first french fries weren’t top quality, it was just as well that
McCain, in its early period, was well diversified into other vegetables.
For a while, frozen peas were a big part of the business, along with french
fries. McCain also packed strawberries, broccoli, cauliflower, beans, and
Brussels sprouts. Later, however, the company decided to focus on french
fries and stopped processing vegetables other than potatoes.
In the long run, having to struggle to obtain the kind of potatoes it
needed benefited McCain by forcing it to acquire expertise in agronomy.
Tony van Leersum, who joined McCain in 1978 to head European operations
and later became corporate vice-president for agriculture, believes
this expertise enabled the company to operate successfully wherever it
went. Because its major competitors, Simplot and Lamb Weston, enjoyed
an ideal growing environment in the U.S. Northwest, they lacked experience
in adapting to less favourable locations. As a result, the U.S. french
12 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 13