From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Leaving for England: (left to
right) Murray and Beatrice
Lovely, Dennis and Esme
Jesson, Milford and Margaret
Kinney, and Clarence and
Elaine Antworth.
out. I want you to go for a year. Take three people
with you – a supervisor for each shift and some
guy you can train for a plant manager, and when
you get that done, you can come home. Come
and see me in Wallace’s office at one o’clock and
tell me who you are going to take.”
This is but one example of the trait Kinney and
many other McCain employees cite as a reason for
the company’s rapid growth under the leadership
of the McCain brothers: quick decision making.
The McCains did not procrastinate when it came
to making decisions. Kinney didn’t feel he was
being ordered to go to England – just strongly
encouraged. “If you thought you could do a job,
you didn’t say no to them,” says Kinney, who was
eighty-four in 2007. “I am sure if I had a good reason, I wouldn’t have had to go.”
Murray Lovely and Clarence Antworth accompanied Kinney to England that fall,
along with Dennis Jesson, an Englishman who had been hired in Britain and had been
training in Florenceville, most recently as cold store manager. (At the time, “cold store”
included freezing, packaging, and shipping the product.) Kinney became production
manager while Lovely and Antworth worked as shift supervisors. At the same time,
Mac McCarthy’s brother James, who had been plant manager at Scarborough, became
manager of the U.K. division of Thomas Equipment, McCain’s farm equipment company.
Kinney, Lovely, and Antworth stayed for one french fry season, from August
to May 1971, when the factory ran out of potatoes to process. Back in Florenceville,
Lovely became legendary for his skill as plant manager at the flagship McCain factory,
where he trained many other plant managers from many countries.
Dennis Jesson stayed on as factory manager and eventually became production
director of the British company. Jesson was an Oxford graduate who had played
three varsity sports and was an Oxford Triple Blue. (A “blue” is awarded to athletes
at Oxford and Cambridge who compete at the highest level of university sport.) It
was often said that Jesson’s management style resembled his style on the rugby field,
where he let no obstacles stand in his way. Although rugby can be a brutal game, it
also requires coordination of the roles of the fifteen players on the team. And, unlike
Canadian or American football, there are no timeouts.
Steve Bullock, a Yorkshire native who worked at Scarborough as training manager,
credits Jesson with bringing order to the Scarborough operation. Bullock cites, as
an example of Jesson’s practical approach to problem solving, his method of ensuring
that the women selected to work on the trim table would not get overly excited
when a field mouse showed up among the potatoes. “Buy some mice and put them
in a box,” Jesson ordered. “When you open the box, some of the women will scream.
Those are the ones we do not want on the trim belt. Send them to the packaging
department.”
Jesson had a simple strategy for overcoming problems and making a resounding
success of the Scarborough plant: bull-headed determination, careful organization,
and non-stop work. If he hadn’t succeeded, McCain would not have been able to
meet the growing demand and might have lost its chance to claim a major share of
the British market. Jesson went on to become managing director of another french
fry company in England acquired by McCain, Potato Allied Services, in Grantham.
After his retirement, he helped launch a new McCain factory in Argentina.
Jim Evans, who joined McCain in 1967 in the engineering department at Florenceville,
experienced a bit of culture shock when he started work in England not
long after the Scarborough plant opened. Florenceville may be rural and isolated, but
most of the workers at the original McCain factory had telephones and cars. Not so
for their Scarborough counterparts in 1970.
Evans, who was production manager for the day shift, sometimes arrived at work
to find a note left by the night manager noting a mishap that had occurred. “I couldn’t
just call him up to get more information, like I could in Canada,” says Evans. “Not just
labourers, even most of my supervisors were not ‘on the phone,’ as they said. So I had
to send somebody out to ‘knock him up’ before I went home so that I could talk to him
48 From the g round up
crossing the AtlA ntic 49
Operations at the
Scarborough plant, 1971:
(left to right) taking a sample
for grading; Dennis Jesson
and engineer John Irons; an
unidentified technician in the
control room.