From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

TOP: Jean Lawler and team
in the test lab. Lawler was a
stickler for quality: if she didn’t
approve of a batch, it wasn’t
shipped.
BOTTOm: Betty Betts in the
quality-control lab, 1959.
fry giants have had less success in expanding outside
North America.
The knowledge that McCain Foods began to acquire
in Florenceville in 1957 is being applied today in locations
as far-flung as China and India. “Today we will
not invest in production facilities in a market until we
know exactly where to grow the potatoes and where the
best potatoes are,” says Terry Bird, vice-president of corporate
development and emerging markets. “In China,
that took us seven years. We would go to one area, we’d
grow, we’d test. Then we would try someplace else.”
The location of the best place to grow determines
the location of the factory. “It takes a kilogram of potatoes
to make half a kilogram of french fries. If your
factory is hundreds of kilometres away from where the
good potato fields are, that adds a lot of cost to the
operation,” Bird explains. “We want the fields within a
hundred kilometres of the factory.”
Although the Florenceville plant had many inadequacies during its early years,
McCain Foods has never depended on technology and machinery for its success. Its
success was, and still is, based on people. In his Christmas message in the company
paper, The Star, in 1972, Harrison McCain said: “We well know that people, not buildings
and equipment, are the chief asset of our group, and we know that our continuing
growth is strictly conditional on the loyalty and efforts of our employees.” By
saying this, he wasn’t just being nice – he was speaking as the realist that he was.
Especially in the early days, it took phenomenal efforts to make a success of
McCain Foods. “Most people don’t realize just how hard Harrison and Wallace
worked to get this business off the ground,” says Allison McCain, chairman of
McCain Foods. “They put their heart and soul into it.”
Recollections of veteran employees published in the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition
of The Star capture the flavour of those early times. Here’s Betty Betts describing
the beginning years at the Florenceville plant:
The first summer that I worked on peas, Harrison ran the line and Wallace worked
in the field. It would be ten, eleven at night and Wallace would come dragging in,
and would he ever be tired. They worked, they really worked! They know where
their first dollar came from because they
worked for it. They would tell us everything
that was happening, everything
that they were going to do and how we
were part of it. And we really believed
that we were part of the McCain family,
believe you me!
Betty Betts is a good example of the
kind of person who helped build McCain
Foods. So is Lester Cox, or “Bud.”
Dubbed the “granddaddy of all supervisors”
by The Star, Cox trained more than
fifty production management trainees
and supervisors. He joined McCain as a
labourer in the cold storage building two
years after the company began production
in Florenceville. At the time, the freezing of the product, the packaging, and the
shipping were part of the cold storage department. Work that today is done by machines,
such as packing the frozen food in plastic bags, in those days was done by humans.
Seven-day weeks of fourteen-hour days were common. Management, including
Harrison and Wallace, helped out wherever help was needed.
Cox recalled labouring alongside the bosses in the cold storage. “Wallace McCain
must have fired me a hundred times,” he told The Star in 1992. “You had to think and
act like them in order to survive. They like people to do things their way. If you do,
you will make out okay.”
Among the future supervisors Cox trained were members of the younger generation
of McCains, including Allison, Scott, Michael, and Peter, as well as several
other university graduates who would later become directors of McCain companies.
“I trained them pretty hard; they knew what work was, anyway,” Cox said. He trained
these younger McCains in what he called “the McCain way,” which means getting the
job done quickly and efficiently. He told them, “Maybe later I will have to work for
you, but now you work for me, and you do as I say.”
In the Star article on Cox, Scott McCain explained the McCain way like this: “Our
production people have been trained over the years to say, ‘Don’t tell me it can’t be
done, just do it.’ … If it means you have to run seven days a week, do it. If the line
14 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 15
Bertha Lunn kisses Harry
Kinney at his 1983 retirement
party, as (left to right)
production manager Scott
McCain, production foreman
Sherdon Cox, and production
supervisor Bud Cox watch on.
Plant manager Murray Lovely
is on the right.