From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

LEFT: Wallace and Harrison
listen as Carl Ash addresses
McCain employees at the
1977 Christmas party.
RIGHT: Carl Ash at his desk,
1987.
lot to do with the company’s success. At one point, Dean spent several months looking
into whether McCain should make its own cheese for its pizzas rather than continue
to rely on an outside supplier. Once he had everything figured out, including
the design for a production line, he took the proposal to Wallace, who immediately
spotted a flaw. It takes a hundred kilograms of milk to make twenty kilograms of
cheese. The rest is whey, a milky water that has little value (though in dried form, it is
used in some food products). “Wallace saw right away that it would be too expensive
for us to try it,” says Dean. (Although McCain Foods did not end up making cheese
at its New Brunswick plants, it later bought several cheese plants in Ontario.)
Archie McLean came aboard in 1972 as vice-president of marketing, eventually
rising to the position of president and CEO of McCain Foods Canada Ltd. Soon after
joining McCain, he found that 55 percent of consumers were preparing their french
fries in the oven rather than deep-frying them, resulting in a french fry lacking in
crispness.
“We should have a product that can be heated in the oven but tastes like it was
prepared in the deep fat fryer,” he said.
Carl Morris set to work in the test kitchen to turn McLean’s vision into reality. He
succeeded in developing a process that gave oven-prepared fries a deep-fried crispness
and flavour. Part of the process was patented and, in 1975, McCain launched
Superfries, which quickly became a resounding success, increasing retail sales of
McCain fries by 30 percent. They are also a bestseller in Great Britain and Australia
as “Oven Chips” and in Europe as “1.2.3 Frites” or “Just Au Four.”
Part of the exhilaration of building McCain Foods was that it was a learning experience
for everyone, including all its senior executives. Nobody in the company had
an MBA. Instead, the executive ranks were filled with
young, energetic managers who weren’t afraid to try
new things and who knew how to learn from their
mistakes.
The first overseas employee hired was Charles “Mac”
McCarthy, who joined in 1965 to launch a British
branch of McCain Foods. He had a good job with
an English frozen food processor, Eskimo Foods.
So why leave to join a risky foreign start-up? “It was
the people,” he says. “The people with Harrison and
Wallace – Andrew and Bob, Timmy Bliss, Carl Ash,
Carl Morris, Don Wishart, Bob Wishart, Paul Dean,
and lots more – all good fellows, all working hard, all enthusiastic, just a great crowd,
and none of us was a sophisticated business operator. We learned as we went on. We
had our experience, and that taught us what to do the next time.”
Good people are vital to building a great company, and so is money. Just as McCain
had the perfect timing for starting a frozen french fry company, so it was fortunate in
its choice of banker. The Bank of Nova Scotia has strong roots in the Maritime provinces
and is the most international of the Canadian banks. While some Canadian
banks dislike lending money against foreign receivables, Scotiabank, which had
branches in Jamaica before it had one in Toronto, tends to be more understanding
of the needs of companies doing business internationally. Historically, says former
chairman Cedric Ritchie, the bank grew by financing the trade in sugar, rum, and
molasses from the south for codfish and lumber from the north.
Ritchie grew up in Upper Kent, near Florenceville, and started his banking career
in nearby Bath. He knew the McCains before he started his ascent up the executive
ladder, which culminated in his appointment as chairman and CEO in 1974, a position
he held until he retired in 1995.
30 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 31
TOP: Archie “Only the Bold
Will Prosper” McLean, 1982.
mIDDLE: The launch of
Superfries gave McCain its
most successful product to
date.
BOTTOm: Mac McCarthy,
1977.