From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

LEFt: Mac and Sheila
McCarthy with Wallace at the
opening of the Whittlesey
plant, 1976.
RIGht: Harrison speaking
at the Whittlesey opening
ceremony.
He was impressed. “The guys there were all excited about what they were doing.
I decided that’s the kind of environment I liked. I went home and I went to see Harrison
and said, ‘I want a job.’” The international aspect was a big attraction for Allison: “I had
the travel bug.”
For prospective British employees, McCain appealed for another reason: its informality
and lack of bureaucracy. Nick Vermont became managing director of McCain GB
in 1998 and in 2005 was named regional CEO for Britain, Ireland, South Africa, and
eastern Europe. He first joined the company in 1983 as the product manager for chips
after working for the catering division of British Rail. The British national railroad
was organized along military lines, he says, and “everything was done by numbers
and processes and procedures.
“British Rail was very slow and bureaucratic. I remember coming to my first interview
at McCain. I was being interviewed by a senior product manager and he
reported to the marketing director, who reported to the managing director, who reported
to Harrison McCain. So it was a much flatter chain of command, and I knew
things would happen fast.”
Steve Bullock, retired personnel manager, and John Blackburn, retired training
manager, both joined McCain in the early 1970s, and both were impressed by the informality
of the workplace. This reflected the personalities of the McCain brothers but
also that of Mac McCarthy. Although English, he had none of the stuffiness Canadians
sometimes associate with English people. He would stop and talk to everyone, regardless
of their position in the company, and make sure everyone knew what was going on
and what management was thinking about. For example, if heavy rains were affecting
a harvest, employees would be warned of the problems they could expect.
In 1982, McCain bought the french fry plant of Potato Allied Services (PAS) in
Grantham from Salvesen Group, a refrigerated transport company. Working for a
company that is taken over by a competitor is always unnerving, and Graham Finn,
who had been with PAS since 1969, didn’t know what to expect. He was amazed by
the attitude of his new bosses when he first met Harrison McCain and Mac: “Here
were the owner of the company and the boss in England talking to you about the
business. They were absolutely awesome – they could talk about the FFA [free fatty
acid] level in the fryer, asked you about the retention time and temperature in the
blancher, what your blanching losses were, your giveaways in the packaging department,
the fan capacity and stack height in the potato storage, which Delta-T you
would normally use for ventilating. They knew everything there was to know about
our business.
“I remember coming out of the first meeting with them wet as a dish cloth. They
tested you, what you knew, what you thought. Salvesen’s would not know a potato
from a turnip; these guys knew more than you did. It was a complete revelation. The
transition went very smoothly.”
Finn liked the new environment so much that, as of 2007, he was still working for
McCain GB, as associate director of agriculture. As he recalls, what impressed him
and his colleagues most of all was that suddenly they were being treated as people.
“With PAS we were a number; with McCain we became persons, with names.”
The U.K. employees had a boss who was comfortable with North American informality.
“There’s nobody in my company in Britain who called me anything but ‘Mac,’
whether they swept the floor of the factory or they were the marketing director,” Mac
McCarthy says. “I was ‘Mac’ to every single person. And Harrison was ‘Harrison’ and
54 From the g round up
crossing the AtlA ntic 55
toP LEFt: Opening of the
Whittlesey plant: (left to right)
Harrison, Eleanor, Billie, Jed
Sutherland (Marie’s husband),
Marie, Wallace, Margie, and
Patrick Johnson (Eleanor’s
husband).
toP RIGht: A tour group
at the plant opening stops
to watch the action at the
trim table.
bottom: Graham Finn,
associate director of
agriculture, 2007.