From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

LEFt: Mrs. A.D. McCain and
her four sons – (left to right)
Wallace, Andrew, Bob, and
Harrison – at the Scarborough
opening.
RIGht: Mac assists Mrs. A.D.
at the official unlocking of
the plant.
sums the company has invested in other countries since, it was nevertheless a big risk
– McCain wasn’t yet financially strong enough to sustain a major failure. If the factory
failed, so would the company.
In early 1968, work started on the Scarborough hillside, and in March 1969 the
factory was ready. All four McCain brothers attended the opening ceremonies, along
with their mother, Laura. It was a major event in the town and local dignitaries were
present to see Mrs. McCain unlock the plant door and proclaim, “May God bless this
factory and all who work in it.”
For the first few months, it seemed she hadn’t been heard. The Scarborough plant
experienced major problems, caused by equipment that didn’t work properly and
by employees who didn’t know how to use the machinery that did work. “It was a
nightmare,” says Wallace McCain. Adds Mac: “It was the only bad time for me after
joining McCain.”
Almost every morning, the motors powering the apparatus in the potato-receiving
area were burnt out and needed to be rewound. The design of the steam boilers didn’t
allow for sufficient expansion, and so the ends sometimes blew off, halting production.
The peeler, which used caustic soda to soften the potato skins, frequently broke down.
And then there was the problem of waste disposal: french fry processing involves
getting rid of large quantities of potato peels.
The Scarborough operation pipes its effluent up the hill and then down into a
bay about three kilometres from the factory. But in the early days, the pump often
malfunctioned, flooding the plant with effluent. The pipe also broke several times,
causing even worse flooding. Even when the pump did work, it didn’t succeed in getting
the waste out into the North Sea, where it could break down. Although peel and
excess bits of potato were, in theory, supposed to be screened out before the effluent
was piped out to the ocean, in practice this didn’t always happen.
“We had loads of complaints about potato peels on the beach,” says Ken Wilmot,
who was production supervisor at the time and later became quality-control manager
and then technical manager. “There was a rock formation on the sea side of the
pipe discharge which held in everything and didn’t allow it to get out to sea. We had
to blast that rock away eventually so that the effluent could get taken out to sea.”
(McCain has long since upgraded its waste treatment techniques. All suspended
solids are now removed before the effluent is pumped into the North Sea through
a two-kilometre-long pipe. In 1997, measures were taken to ensure that European
Economic Community bathing-water standards for Scarborough beaches are sustained.)
The rough start-up was painful, but it was probably inevitable. McCain built the
Scarborough plant the same way it had built the Florenceville factory and the same
way it was building the company as a whole: through a process of trial and error. The
new factory was much larger than the one at Florenceville, and some of the machinery
in it was the first of its kind. But Scarborough was an invaluable learning experience
for McCain. The company put the lessons learned there to use immediately in
building another new plant, in Grand Falls, New Brunswick.
Harrison McCain had the problems in Scarborough on his mind at nine o’clock
one sunny Florenceville morning in the spring of 1970 when he walked over to the
production area to talk to Milford Kinney, one of his most experienced managers. As
Kinney recalls it, they sat down on a junk pile behind the plant.
Harrison said, “We’ve got trouble in England, and I want you to go and straighten it
46 From the g round up
crossing the AtlA ntic 47
LEFt: Margie and Wallace
McCain at the Scarborough
opening reception, along
with:
mIddLE: Sheila and Mac
McCarthy, and
RIGht: Billie and Harrison
McCain.