From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

CHAPTER FOUR
Down UnDer
In 1971, Wallace McCain took a trip to Daylesford, a village about a hundred kilometres
north of Melbourne, in southern Australia. Daylesford is known in Australia for
its rejuvenating mineral springs, but Wallace didn’t come to take the waters.
He came because Daylesford was in Australian potato country and a french fry
plant there was for sale. The plant, a former woollen mill that was being used to
process dehydrated potatoes, was small and dilapidated but it was going cheap. More
impressive to Wallace was what he saw in the nearby fields.
He phoned his brother Harrison to tell about his remarkable discovery, something
inconceivable in New Brunswick: “I was in a field today; they were planting potatoes
and right across the road in another field they were harvesting potatoes.”
The Daylesford plant had no potato storage facilities, but that wasn’t a problem,
Wallace thought, because in the temperate Australian climate potatoes could be kept
in the ground until needed. It was only after he bought the plant for McCain Foods
that he discovered how wrong he was.
It doesn’t freeze during the Australian winter, in June, July, and August, but it rains
a lot. When there are a few dry days, the farmer harvests his potatoes but by then they
have too much sugar and are too low in solids to make good french fries. “We didn’t
understand it,” Wallace says now. “We just didn’t understand the agronomy.”
The lack of storage at the Daylesford plant wasn’t the only thing that went wrong
in Australia. In the early years, not much went right. McCain was shipping product
from New Brunswick, and sometimes the cardboard boxes of french fries – often
called chips in Australia, as in Britain – were crushed during the voyage. The first
Australian manager Wallace hired got into a dispute with the Australian government
over payment of import duties. He also put his in-laws on the McCain payroll.
down under
FACING PAGE: View of New
Zealand’s Heretaunga Plains,
looking north toward Napier,
Hawke’s Bay. Gum trees, seen
here in the foreground, are
common in New Zealand.
103