From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

CHAPTER TWO
Crossing the AtlAntiC
Harrison McCain stood on a hill in the seaside town of Scarborough, on England’s
Yorkshire coast, and stared in amazement. Then he turned to Wallace McCain and
Mac McCarthy and said, “You must both have been drunk when you bought this
piece of land.”
The land in question was to be the site of a McCain Foods factory. On completion,
in 1969, it would become the company’s first manufacturing facility outside Canada.
But it was hardly an ideal spot to build a frozen foods factory. The sloping terrain
would increase construction costs and result in awkward internal arrangements, such
as the cold storage area being almost two metres above the rest of the plant. However,
it was the best site available at the time.
Scarborough, England, bears no resemblance to the sprawling suburb, part of the
Greater Toronto megalopolis, that is its Canadian namesake. Rather, it is a beach resort
on the North Sea with a permanent population of about fifty thousand, rising to
two hundred thousand in the summer.
It wasn’t the company’s first choice – that had been McCarthy’s hometown of
Grimsby, close to Lincolnshire’s potato country, where McCain Foods already had
an office. But no suitable site was available there and so the company settled on
Scarborough. Scarborough did have several advantages, including an abundant supply
of both water and labour. Wastewater from the plant could be piped directly into
the North Sea. Also, Scarborough was in a depressed area where the British government
was prepared, in an effort to attract industry and create jobs, to subsidize construction
of factories. And its municipal council was eager to attract McCain because
a food processing plant would be an ideal complement to the short summer tourist
industry that employed many female workers in hotels and restaurants for three
months but left them without jobs the rest of the year.
crossing the AtlA ntic
FACING PAGE: North Yorkshire,
with the purple heather fields
of the moor in the distance.
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