From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

TOP: Truck advertising
“three-star” french fries, at
the Harnes factory, 1981.
BOTTOM: Francis Dupont,
managing director, McCain
Alimentaire, 1981.
Harrison never took delivery of Harrison the horse,
but McCain Foods did take delivery of Van Leersum,
who agreed to stay on at the Hoofddorp plant for a
couple of months to ensure a smooth transition and
instead spent the rest of his career working for McCain,
in a variety of roles. When Harrison hired him, he told
Van Leersum, “You work for me, but you also have to
satisfy my brother. Whatever Wallace tells you to do,
that is also my decision.”
McClure, who had never intended to stay in Europe
permanently, returned to Canada in 1975. One morning
in 1978, Van Leersum got a call from Harrison, in Paris.
McClure’s successor had departed the night before and Harrison wanted to offer the
job of managing director for Europe to Van Leersum. “We have booked you on a
flight for Paris. It’s leaving in an hour,” he said.
Van Leersum’s first job as managing director was one he had little taste for. A
French distributor, Pomona, had exclusive rights to McCain products in France.
These products, coming from the English plants, with their more modern equipment,
were superior to the product coming out of McCain’s Dutch plants. Harrison had
decided he wanted to supply France from the Netherlands and that Pomona would
no longer have exclusive rights to McCain’s fries but would have to share the McCain
rights with the two French distributors for the Van Tuyl company. This decision reflected
McCain’s position as the company with the best potato-processing technology
in Europe. It was now strong enough to insist on the most advantageous terms for
itself in its arrangements with distributors.
Harrison McCain, McCarthy, and Van Leersum arrived at the Pomona office to
meet with the company’s officials. It was only as they were walking up the stairs that
McCain told Van Leersum that it was he who would have to inform Pomona of the
new arrangement. The meeting was warm and friendly until Van Leersum broke the
bad news. Pomona, not surprisingly, was unhappy with the decision. Although it
nominally remained a distributor, for several years afterward it made little effort to sell
McCain’s products. As of 2007, however, a good relationship had been re-established
and Pomona was once again a valued McCain customer.
By this time, the attention of the leadership of McCain Foods was focused on
France. Van Leersum’s mandate was to expand the company’s presence there. McCain
incorporated in France as McCain Alimentaire, and Van Leersum became the first
president of the French company, dividing his time between
the Dutch and French offices.
After leaving Europe, George McClure headed
McCain’s U.S. operation, then left the company to go
back into public service with the government. But in
1979, he came back as vice-president of corporate development.
One of his jobs was to help McCain get established
in potato processing in France. The company
was growing rapidly on the continent for the same reasons
it had grown in Canada and Britain – the spread of
quick-service restaurants and the movement of women
into the work force, which triggered greater demand
for quick meal preparation at home. It needed more capacity to meet the demand;
the question was where to put it. Germany was the largest market, but it was ruled
out because costs were higher there. The company already had three plants in the
Netherlands. France seemed the logical choice.
“France had a huge potato production that was totally untapped by processors,”
explains McClure, who ended up commuting for sixteen months between Canada
and France in search of a site. He engaged the help of Alain Thiers, the former secretary
of the French Potato Growers Association. Thiers, who had been a member of
the French army’s last horse-mounted cavalry operation during the war in Algeria,
knew everyone in the French potato industry. With his help, McClure looked at potential
sites in all the potato-growing areas but could not settle on one.
One day, McClure and Thiers were driving through Harnes, in the northwest part
of the country near the Belgian border, when they spotted a large copper wire factory
with a for sale sign on it. McClure pulled over. The building was about the size of
McCain’s new plants in Canada and Great Britain, and he wanted to show Thiers,
who had never seen a modern french fry factory, how big such a factory was.
The copper wire plant had high ceilings and plenty of land around it. It dawned
on McClure that this might be just what he was looking for. Tim Bliss came from
Florenceville to have a look, as did Wallace and Harrison McCain and Mac McCarthy.
They all agreed with McClure. But they knew that doing business in France was not as
easy as doing business in Canada or Britain, as the French government imposed more
regulations that limit the freedom of action of private business. So McCain Foods, rather
than buy the factory, bought an option to buy it. “We wanted to see what problems
we would have with the French government,” says McClure. “And there were lots.”
78 From the Ground up
Across the chA nnel 79
TOP: The Harnes factory in
2000, a potato field in the
foreground.
BOTTOM: Cor Koster, chief
of operations for continental
Europe, 1986.