From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

ABOVE and LEFT: Fire at the Florenceville factory, December 31,
1989. BELOW: Firefighter with volunteer firefighter Jim Bushby
(right), of McCain.
couldn’t be sold because of smoke damage. But it was
still good to eat, so ninety-three tractor trailer loads
rolled out of Florenceville to deliver it to food banks in
the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, and Ontario.
The significance of the great fire is in what it revealed
about the company and how far it had come since it
first opened for business on that very spot thirty-two
years earlier. Such a fire in the early years would have
been a calamity, perhaps closing McCain Foods down
for good. In 1989, however, the partial destruction and
closure of the company’s flagship plant was a nuisance
rather than a disaster. It was merely an unfortunate end
to an excellent year.
In 1989, McCain achieved $2 billion in sales for the
first time in its history. This was a remarkable achievement
considering that the company had passed the
$1 billion mark only four years previously. By reaching
$2 billion in 1989, McCain surpassed the goals it
had set for itself in 1985 of doubling sales in five years.
Instead, it did it in only four by increasing sales of existing products, developing
new ones, and acquiring other companies.
In the 1980s, Japan was in its heyday as the world’s new economic superpower, and
much was written about the management style responsible for the country’s success.
What it all boiled down to was an obsession with quality. The Japanese knew that the
way to achieve high quality in manufacturing was through a constant flow of small
improvements in the manufacturing process. Over the long term, those small improvements
added up to major improvements and higher profits.
McCain’s management understood that from the beginning. As Wallace McCain
said in 1989, “At the same time that competition is getting tougher, we are more than
meeting the challenge by increasing productivity and improving quality on a continuing
basis.” Or, as Harrison liked to say, “If you are standing still, you are going
backwards.”
Only one direction was acceptable: forward. That meant expanding to new territories
and building or buying new production facilities. And it meant constant striving
for improvement in the methodology of growing potatoes and processing them.
Morris and Tim Bliss, vice-president of engineering, visited the various plants
126 f rom the Ground up
the home front 127
Wallace in the lab, surveying
an assortment of McCain
packaging.