From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

CHAPTER ONE
THE BEGINNING
In 1955, Harrison and Wallace McCain were looking for a business to start. Both had
been working for one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs, K.C. Irving. But
neither intended to spend a lifetime as an employee. They had learned a lot and now
they were ready to run a company of their own.
They had plenty of street smarts, loads of ambition, and all the energy and confidence
they would need to be successful entrepreneurs. They also had some money
they had inherited from their father, A.D. McCain, who had built a business as an
exporter of potatoes to the Caribbean and Latin America and was a successful stock
market investor. What Harrison, then twenty-eight years old, and Wallace, twentyfive,
didn’t have was a good idea.
It was almost three years since they had started talking about launching a business
and still they hadn’t hit upon that elusive something they really wanted to do. They
had thought about, and rejected, dozens of schemes and suggestions, from buying
a seat on the Montreal Stock Exchange to setting up a Coca-Cola distributorship to
operating a laundry business.
Harrison had spent five years as a sales manager for Irving Oil. “I had an excellent
time there,” he said in an interview in 1997. “But I had an overriding drive to be in
business for myself. I thought something would turn up some day. And one day I decided
nothing was going to turn up.” So he resigned from Irving Oil to devote himself
full time to the search for a business opportunity.
While Harrison was exploring possibilities, Wallace who had just married, continued
working for the Irving hardware chain, Thorne’s Hardware. One day in January
1956, Harrison called Wallace to tell him their elder brother, Bob, had suggested they
consider the frozen food business.
xvi From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 1
FACING PAGE: Potato
harvesting in the early days
of McCain Foods. Mechanical
lifters pulled the potatoes
out of the soil and pickers
piled them into barrels. Local
schools closed for weeks
during the annual fall harvest.