From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Milton Rodda and technical
services manager Dan
Dawkins, 2007.
it to his cattle. The waste contained a caustic chemical then used in the
peeling process but the cattle seemed to enjoy it and ate all that was offered
to them. This experiment ended when the cattle got sick.
The best that could be said about the Daylesford factory was that it
was colourful. “At night, you could see stars through the roof any time
you looked up,” recalls Cameron, who was transferred to Australia from
New Brunswick in 1975. With such a roof, it is no surprise that the plant
flooded whenever it rained. On one occasion a maintenance employee
went up on the roof, which was made of corrugated asbestos, to make a
repair. He fell through and landed, unhurt, on the factory floor, having
missed the boiling-hot fryer by just a few feet.
“We had possums,” recalls Cameron. “We stored cartons there, and
you’d be pulling possums out of the cardboard packaging.”
The plant manager was a Canadian, Keith Thompson. Sometimes he
chatted with the young man who was the vacation fill-in for the regular
postman who brought the mail to Thompson’s house. His name was
Milton Rodda, a twenty-seven-year-old Daylesford native who earned
most of his living by hunting, fishing, and doing seasonal jobs such as logging and
harvesting potatoes and fruit. He had chosen this life after quitting a job as a bank
teller because he wanted more freedom.
“In 1974, Keith offered me work at McCain should I ever want it, but nothing was
farther from my mind,” Rodda says. “At the time I was working in the forest driving
a Timber Jack retrieving hardwood logs for transport to a local sawmill. My boss and
good mate was killed while delivering one of these loads. And since I was suddenly
without work, I contacted Keith and agreed to a one-week trial at the Daylesford
plant as a labourer unloading potatoes.”
That was the start of a thirty-year career with McCain Australia during which
Rodda became a field manager whose expertise in potato agronomy played an important
role in improving the raw materials that came out of the Australian potato
fields and into McCain factories.
In a modern processing plant, truckloads of potatoes from the field are delivered
directly into huge storage bins. In those days, they arrived in seventy-kilogram bags
and were tipped into half-ton wooden storage crates. Rodda’s job that first week was
to unload the potatoes and then transfer them to the start of the production line.
“Keith and I had a discussion at the end of the first week, and I agreed to stay a
little longer. Keith asked me what I thought a fair wage would be,” says Rodda. “I saw
a chance to end my period of poverty and suggested an
amount quite a bit higher than what I had been used
to as a farm labourer. Keith agreed and I was pleased
with myself. Shortly after, I discovered I was getting
less than the women on the production line. Another
discussion with Keith solved this problem.”
Because Daylesford couldn’t supply all the product
the market demanded, McCain continued to ship
french fries from Canada. The Daylesford employees
had to unload the shipments onto pallets to be placed
in the cold storage unit. Unfortunately, shipboard refrigeration
wasn’t always reliable and the Canadian
fries sometimes rotted en route.
“You have not lived until you’ve stood in front of a container of potatoes turned
into five feet of slurry after a few weeks’ decay at sea,” observes Rodda. “And then
there was the job of following the load to the local tip and scraping the lot out. We
earned our pay those days.”
Another of Rodda’s jobs was keeping the fryer supplied with cooking fat. In a
twenty-first-century french fry plant, liquid oil is pumped in at the press of a button.
At Daylesford, the fat was in the form of twenty-kilogram blocks of tallow, stored in
cardboard boxes. “My job was to climb onto a pallet, held by a forklift, full of these
boxes. The forklift raised me above the fryer and, while taking care not to fall in, I
had to unpack the blocks of tallow and slide them into the fryer while avoiding the
boiling oil that splashed with each block I released.” To reduce the risk, this practice
was changed so that a heated rod liquefied the blocks of fat. The liquid then poured
into the fryer.
Despite the plant’s many defects, employees made every effort to ensure that all
the food shipped from it was good. “We fried everything in boiling oil and later froze
everything and to my knowledge never killed a soul,” says Rodda.
Labour relations at the plant, however, were poor. Workers sometimes showed
their displeasure by spraying water into the cold storage area, ruining the packages of
french fries stored there. Clearly, if McCain was going to stay in Australia, it needed
a better facility. The company decided to build a new factory in Ballarat, a city with a
population then of about seventy thousand.
The workers were angry about losing their jobs in Daylesford, especially those
whose entire family was employed at the plant, and labour relations continued to
106 From the Ground up
down under 107
A potato crop at D&Y Pike’s
farm in Gippsland, New South
Wales, Australia.