From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Scouting a field of a purpleflowered
potato variety for
disease.
and find out what happened when, say, the end blew off
the pipe. And since hardly anyone had a car, the person
who went to get him would usually go on a bicycle.”
Lack of storage capacity at the plant was a major problem.
The storage problems were compounded by the
wide variety and erratic quality of the raw potatoes
coming into the plant. McCain has two grades of french
fry – the top or “McCain grade,” and a lower grade, usually
containing a higher proportion of shorter fries, that
is packed under the Caterpac label in Britain, Favorita
in continental Europe, and Valley Farms in Canada and
elsewhere. If the plant is depending on truck deliveries
and the suppliers can’t be counted on to deliver the desired grade, production is disrupted.
And that’s what happened at Scarborough.
When the potatoes arrived at the plant, they were tested for size and colour. The
McCain-grade potatoes went in one bin and the lower grade ones in another. But the
bins were relatively small – holding only enough potatoes for about two hours worth
of processing. If the plant was processing chips to be sold under the McCain brand
and too many trucks came in with the lower grade potatoes, there was no place to put
them. As well, the plant lacked space to store enough plastic bags and boxes to pack
the finished product.
Most of the potatoes came from Yorkshire and the adjoining county of Lincolnshire,
a journey of up to three hours. Trucks that didn’t arrive at the scheduled time could
cause production to stop if there weren’t enough raw potatoes on hand.
The raw materials were also a problem. English farmers, like the Canadian farmers
in the Saint John River Valley, were used to producing table potatoes for the retail
market: they weren’t set up to switch overnight to potatoes suitable for processing.
Cultural differences complicated matters. New Brunswick growers were often small
operators scraping out a living, eager to supply to an important new customer. The
English farms tended to be large estates, some of them centuries old, run by professional
managers.
“These farmers were descended from families that had been in farming for hundreds
of years,” recalls Evans. “The farmers would drive up in a Land Rover or a
Mercedes. They were used to growing certain varieties that suited their customers or
their type of earth or their part of the country, and some smartass guy from the colonies
comes over and tells them to grow Russet Burbank. They said, in effect, to take
a hike.” Although Russet Burbank was the preferred potato for french fries in North
America because of its length, it was not grown in Britain at the time.
French fry manufacturing then was labour intensive. Electronic defect removal
systems had not yet been invented, and McCain depended on short-term female labour
to operate the trim table. The company invited prospective employees for coffee
at a local nightclub on Saturday mornings. Advertisements showing women in bikinis
read “Come work with us for eight weeks and earn money for a vacation in the
sun.” The workers were each offered a free hairdo and, because they had to stand for
long periods, the services of a chiropodist.
All the effort and aggravation of getting the Scarborough plant running smoothly
had a huge payoff for McCain. As the 1970s began, the company had the largest french
fry factory outside North America just when demand for that product was about
to take off, both in Britain and continental Europe. The same social and economic
trends that favoured the french fry business in North America were appearing across
the Atlantic. Women were entering the workforce in growing numbers, increasing
the demand for frozen food that could be quickly prepared after the work day.
To appeal to that same demand for convenience, the major fast food chains were
expanding out of their North American base. Kentucky Fried Chicken (which
changed its name to KFC in 1991), Burger King, and McDonald’s all set up shop in
Britain, and all three became McCain customers. Mac is especially proud that the
British branch made the first McCain sale anywhere to McDonald’s. The deal gave
50 From the g round up
crossing the AtlA ntic 51
LEFt: Harvesting potatoes
in England.
RIGht: Sampling potatoes
early in the growing cycle.
The number of tubers on
each plant is an indicator
of crop size.