From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Wallace and Harrison in 1967,
at the opening of Thomas
Equipment.
Surprised by the speed of the response, Mac replied,
“I wrote only yesterday.”
Harrison said, “I haven’t got the letter. I’ve been in
London for a week.”
“I believe in fate,” said Mac. “Come down now.
“I bought two hundred tons of peas from him,
which he was delighted to sell me. I later discovered
they had an excess from the year before, so it was very
good for them.”
The two businessmen had dinner together and then
Mac returned Harrison to his hotel. It was not one of
the grand London hotels that he would later frequent as
the company became more prosperous but a small inn with a few rooms over a pub.
By the time they got there, it was locked for the night.
“I took him to my house and he slept in one of the kids’ bedrooms,” says Mac. “We
stayed up until the early hours of the morning learning about each other, putting the
world to right, and I can clearly remember saying as he retired to go to bed, ‘I have
never met anyone who can speak so long and so fast as you.’
“He said, ‘You should meet my brother, Wallace. He’s a ball of fire.’
“I thought, ‘Gosh, the two of them together must be a real ball of fire.’”
By selling Canadian-grown peas in Britain and forging a relationship with a
British wholesaler, Harrison McCain was groping his way toward the beachhead
strategy that would serve the company so well in the decades ahead: from that point
on, McCain always entered a new market by exporting product to it from its factories
elsewhere, thereby establishing a beachhead. Only when the McCain brand was well
established would it begin production in the new territory.
At first, however, McCain did not sell its own brand in Britain. Instead it shipped
french fries and other items produced at Florenceville to be sold under the brands
of Eskimo and other British packers. Every four months or so, Harrison McCain
showed up in England to make deals.
“Every time he came over, we met,” says Mac. “Sometimes he stayed with us. We
always did something together. He was always enthusiastic about everything he did,
and I loved it. We became very, very close friends.”
Harrison decided he wanted Mac to work for McCain Foods – in Canada. He
refused. “The beer was too cold and there was no cricket and there wasn’t really the
football that I was used to here. It wasn’t my life. I didn’t want to do that.”
Mac had a better idea: he would stay in Britain, McCain would launch its own
operation there, and he would run it.
Harrison wasn’t sure that was a good idea. McCain was selling its products to food
packers in the United Kingdom who might not appreciate a supplier going into competition
with them. But McCain was going to lose that business anyway, replied Mac,
because eventually the major companies would decide to process their own products.
In 1965, Mac came to North America on a business trip. “I went to see Harrison
and Wallace every weekend, and on the third weekend they agreed to start a company
in England.”
And so, at the age of thirty-seven and with a wife and five children to support, Mac
left a good job with a strong company to launch the first foreign subsidiary of a small
Canadian food processor that nobody in Britain and even few Canadians had ever
heard of. Clearly, he had great confidence in the potential of the business.
McCain’s first U.K. headquarters was Mac’s Grimsby home, where his wife, Sheila,
handled phone calls, dealt with bills of lading for imported food from Canada, and
did the typing. He spent his days on the road trying to convince wary British restaurateurs
of the merits of frozen chips. Those were his pioneering times, he recalls
– years of long workdays and seven-day work weeks.
He relied on the same system of demonstrating the product in restaurant kitchens
that had worked so well in Canada, having been perfected by Dick McWhirter. It
was, Mac points out, the same system used for many years by door-to-door vacuum
cleaner salespeople: “You know, somebody comes in and vacuums the carpets. ‘Oh,
that’s a wonderful vacuum cleaner, I’ll buy it.’ Well, with our french fries, we would
go in and try to persuade the caterer to allow us to fry our french fries and compare
the quality and cost with the product they were using – usually chips made from fresh
potatoes.” Most restaurants in those days did not have freezers, and McCain would
sometimes supply one as a way of getting its frozen chips accepted.
In 1965, McCain bought the London-based company Caterpac, a group of twelve
frozen food distributors. The following year, the name was changed to McCain
International Ltd. and later to McCain Foods (GB) Ltd., when the Florencevillebased
sales organization McCain International was established. McCain Foods GB
is responsible for Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales – as well as for Northern
Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
At first, Mac concentrated his efforts entirely on the food service industry, as that
was the fastest way to acquire volume. Once demand had been created by selling to
the end users, McCain chose wholesalers to distribute the product.
42 From the g round up
crossing the AtlA ntic 43
Ads targeting the food
service industry, comparing
the advantages of McCain
frozen french fries with
those of fresh potatoes.
Ads top and middle,
1966–67; bottom, 1975.