From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Les McIntosh, personnel
manager; Tim Bliss, chief
engineer; and Don Wishart,
purchasing manager, 1969.
built factories to process potatoes and other raw materials
into frozen food products the consumers of the world
wanted to buy. “How did they know how to do something
in Australia?” asks Carl Morris. “Because in Florenceville
they had done every job that was to be done: harvesting
potatoes, cutting them, sorting them, cooking them,
packaging them, putting them in the cold storage, loading
them on the trucks.”
While Wallace and Harrison were learning the basics
of the manufacturing process, they were also learning
how to run an organization and how to recruit the talent
without whom they knew they would never realize their
ambitions. Morris went on to become vice-president of
manufacturing for McCain Foods Canada, then senior
vice-president, and then launched McCain’s business in
Japan and South Korea as president of McCain Japan.
Another key early recruit was Tim Bliss, who also
joined in 1962 and became corporate vice-president of engineering. Bliss was a friend
of Wallace McCain’s from their college days at the University of New Brunswick. Both
spent summers as officer cadets in the University Naval Training Division and during
the summer of 1951 were stationed together at Esquimalt, on Vancouver Island. Their
ship took a one-month training cruise to Hawaii, where they spent seven days. Once
they had completed their time in Esquimalt, they returned to New Brunswick via the
Panama Canal on a cruiser, the HMCS Ontario, accompanying a destroyer returning
from the Korean War.
Bliss likes to point out that he didn’t use his friendship with Wallace McCain to
get a job at McCain Foods. He was working for Engineering Consultants Inc., a firm
owned by Irving, when he heard that McCain was looking for an engineer. “Irving
and McCain had a gentleman’s agreement not to rob management personnel from
one other,” Bliss recalls. “So McCain couldn’t contact me, but I could contact them.”
Bliss called not Wallace but Harrison McCain, who, after consulting with Wallace
as he always did, promptly hired Bliss. Morris and Bliss provided the expertise
Wallace and Harrison themselves lacked. “They made a dramatic hit with the company,”
Wallace says, “because one understood production and one understood engineering,
which Harrison and I knew nothing about.”
One advantage of living and working in a village is that you don’t waste time com-
muting to and from work. Bliss soon discovered the advantage of living five minutes
from the plant: he could get there quickly when he was awakened in the middle of
the night.
“One night that we were running peas, I came into work three times. And one
Christmas Day, I got a phone call at eight in the morning from the watchman. He
said, ‘You’d better come up here and have a look. A wall of that new cold store we’re
building out back just fell down.’ So I went to the plant in the howling wind and
blowing snow. We went out and had a look. There wasn’t anything we could do except
survey the damage and start Boxing Day to fix it.”
Bliss enjoyed working in a place where a constant sense of urgency prevailed: “It
was a case of production trying to keep up with sales. We just couldn’t make enough
product.” The factory was shut down in the summer because it ran out of potatoes
– there wasn’t yet technology to store them year round. But that didn’t mean work
stopped. The production downtime was used to build additions to the factory and
upgrade equipment in order to increase the plant’s output and keep up with soaring
demand. And in the couple of months before the new season’s potatoes arrived, the
factory processed other vegetables.
That McCain’s french fries had become so popular so quickly was a testament to the
selling skills of Harrison and Wallace. “We produced some damn poor products, but
20 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 21
LEFT: At the 1976
International Food Show,
London, England.
RIGHT: Harrison promotes
McCain products at a 1970
food show.