From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

CHAPTER THREE
Across the chAnnel
It was a sunny day in August 1971 and George McClure was about to leave for the
Netherlands to launch the continental European division of McCain Foods. McClure;
his wife, Donna; and their four children were sitting in a car in the driveway of
Harrison McCain’s house in Florenceville. In a couple of minutes they would be on
the highway en route to the Fredericton airport, the first leg of a trip that would end
in Amsterdam.
As their driver turned the ignition, Harrison McCain leaned into the car and
looked McClure in the eyes. “I guess I should tell you what your mandate is,” he said.
“Your mandate is to dominate the frozen french fry business in Europe.”
The recollection brings a smile to McClure’s face. “That was so typical of Harrison,”
he says. “It was the only instruction I ever got.”
Some mandate. A small food-processing company based in a New Brunswick village
was supposed to dominate a vast, multilingual continent with a population of
more than four hundred million. It didn’t faze Harrison McCain that the continent he
proposed to dominate with McCain french fries was where the french fry had been
invented, about 170 years earlier.
Nobody knows the genius’s name, but it’s generally accepted by culinary historians
that it was a Belgian, sometime around the start of the nineteenth century,
who first dropped a potato strip into boiling fat, thereby creating the first frite.
“We call them French fries, but they really are Belgian fries,” says Jean Bernou,
who is French.
Bernou heads McCain’s European operations, presiding over a division that, in
2005, had almost $900 million in sales and spans thirty-five countries and twentyfour
languages. McCain operates eight factories on the continent, including one at
Across the chA nnel
FACING PAGE: A potato
field and traditional windmill
in the Netherlands.
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