From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Canadian, eh?
During a royal visit to New Brunswick, then premier Frank
McKenna mentioned to Prince Charles that the province
is the home base of an important multinational company,
McCain Foods.
Not so, replied the Prince. He was well acquainted with
McCain, he said, and knew it was a British company.
The Prince’s error was a common one. In fact, few people
know that the world’s largest producer of french fries
originated in the Maritime province of New Brunswick and
still maintains factories there and offices in the village of
Florenceville.
Mac McCarthy recalls a meeting attended by a British
agriculture minister who cited “the great example of that
British company McCain Foods, which started from small
beginnings in Scarborough.”
Informed McCain was Canadian, he shot back, “It’s not. I
know the people there, and it’s definitely an English company.”
Tony van Leersum remembers flying from Florenceville to
Chicago in 1985 with Harrison and Wallace McCain to try to
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From the g round up
persuade McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner to buy McCain french
fries. “You must be tired after that long flight,” Turner said.
The McCain executives were baffled by the comment until
they realized that Turner assumed they had flown in from
Britain where, he thought, McCain had its head office.
Unlike IKEA, which makes a point in its advertising to
identify itself as Swedish, McCain has chosen not to emphasize
its origins. This, says Nick Vermont, CEO of McCain
Foods GB, “is a reflection of the considerable autonomy each
of the local companies has had in the areas of marketing
and advertising and the way in which the brand is presented
to the consumer. We found that consumers in
Britain do not think of McCain as being Canadian – British
or perhaps Scottish, but certainly not Canadian.”
Harrison McCain cared about whether people bought his
product, not whether they knew the company’s nationality:
“We’re a British company in Britain and a Canadian company
in Canada.”
in the early part of the 1980s to centralize the company’s
financial administration. The various McCain companies
around the world were asked to send their financial figures
by satellite to Florenceville, where a monthly profitand-loss
statement was to be created. Mac refused.
“No financial figures leave our office before I have had
a look at them and agree with the conclusions,” he said.
“Not even to Harrison. I will not agree to anything that
means that Harrison will have figures before I have seen
and agreed to them.” The program was not implemented.
(By 2007, however, 97 percent of McCain’s transactions
worldwide were being processed at the Florenceville Data Processing Centre, but
each operating managing director or president sees the results before they are published
in Canada.)
Yet, Mac did understand the need to change with the times. In 1996, Anil Rastogi,
corporate vice-president and chief information officer, wanted the U.K. operation to
buy £300,000 worth of personal computers. He was told, “Mac will never agree to
do this.” So Rastogi went to see him in England. He entered the office prepared for a
difficult hour of explaining. Mac started by asking him why McCain should spend so
much money on new computers. Rastogi, in five minutes, summed up his reasons.
Mac said, “We cannot stop progress, can we?” and authorized the expenditure on
the spot.
Success in business never happens without risk, the risk being the possibility of failure.
Mac McCarthy took a risk when he left a secure job to launch a small, unknown
Canadian company in Britain. The McCains also took a risk in Britain and continued
to take risks as they planted the McCain flag around the world. “For many years, maybe
ten, as with any small business growing rapidly, you bet the bundle every year, year
after year,” Harrison McCain told Executive magazine in 1984. “If you’re wrong once,
you’re out. We kept pushing the business as hard as we could, borrowing all we could,
building and borrowing and building. We were risking it all on deal after deal.”
By successfully establishing itself in Britain, McCain Foods acquired a strong position
in a market twice the size of its home market. And just across the English
Channel, there were more deals to make and other markets to conquer.
crossing the AtlA ntic
AbovE: Mac and Wallace.
FACING PAGE: Harrison
and Mac at the Scarborough
plant. Mac has just received
his twenty-five-year pin.
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