From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

LEFt: Construction of the
Scarborough plant begins:
Mac McCarthy at the sodbusting.
RIGht: The Scarborough
plant under construction,
as seen from the bottom
of Havers Hill.
In October 1965, Mac recruited Hal Kinder to join McCain’s new British venture as
accountant. Kinder, with remarkable foresight, could see that the fledgling Canadian
company had a good chance at success. It was “in the right place at the right time,”
he recalled in a 1984 interview in the McCain’s Star. “The frozen french fry market in
Britain really hadn’t been exploited. The market was absolutely new … We had the
product and we had a unique way of selling the product.”
Good leadership is indispensable to both building a company and inspiring confidence
in employees. In Mac, McCain Foods had chosen just the leader it needed to
build the company in the United Kingdom. It was his presence that prompted Kinder
to leave a good job as chief accountant in a retail group of companies: “I can remember
meeting Mac for the first time. It was really his personality and enthusiasm
that told me the company was going to succeed … Mac described the operation of
McCain Foods in Canada to me and said that the intentions were to develop a market
from scratch for McCain Canadian products, which would lead eventually to an
investment in a manufacturing unit. This might take two years, three years, ten years
– there was no real time frame planned. It depended on the success of the effort.”
At that time, Kinder was one of only four McCain employees based outside
Canada. The others were Mac, a secretary, and Harry Harrison, who handled orders
and logistics.
Just as the beachhead strategy was first developed for McCain’s U.K. and, later, Australian
markets, so was the policy of exporting the company’s accumulated knowledge
and expertise by sending experienced personnel from an established location to
help get things started at a new one. Shortly after Kinder came aboard, McCain sent
four people from Canada to train a British sales force in the end-user system.
It worked. “Everybody involved in the company in those early days was so enthusiastic
about the growing achievements,” said Kinder. “Each week and each month we
saw improvements on the previous period.”
The company’s intense focus on producing one product, french fries, for one market
segment, the food service industry, enabled it to boost volumes quickly. Before
long, McCain had the problem every manufacturer wants – it couldn’t keep up with
demand. “We had to import all the product from Canada, and this was becoming a
problem in organizing the number of shipments that we needed to maintain supplies,
as the volumes were growing so quickly,” Kinder said.
And so, just two years after launching McCain Foods in Britain, the company
made the decision to build a factory. The plant in Scarborough would become, for
a time, the largest french fry plant in the world outside North America. Although
the $2.6 million McCain invested does not seem so large in light of the far greater
44 From the g round up
crossing the AtlA ntic 45
McCain joins in Scarborough’s
annual carnival in the
summer of 1968. Its float,
consisting of a tractor and a
Thomas Equipment harvester,
announced the company’s
impending arrival.