From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

TOP LEFT: Bob Ferguson,
New Brunswick snack foods
sales supervisor, next to a
McCain potato-chip truck.
TOP RIGHT: Pop-a-Doodle
production, 1970.
BOTTOm: McCain chips came
in a variety of flavours.
up to Birds Eye standards. “I got to know Harrison and Wallace quite well,” he said,
“and we became good friends.”
Although he turned down the job offer, Morris still got involved with the company.
“I became the first engineer to consult for McCain – without pay. If they were
working on a project, such as putting in a new blancher, they would say, ‘How big
do you think that ought to be?’ We would be having dinner and I would draw it on
a napkin.”
Gradually, Morris changed his opinion: maybe Harrison and Wallace would
amount to something after all. He liked their ambition to develop the company and
their ability to make decisions quickly. General Foods never made a wrong decision,
he says, but the company leaders took so long to make it that any advantage was
often lost.
So, on April Fool’s Day 1962, Morris started working at McCain Foods as plant
manager. He relished the chance, absent at Birds Eye, to work in an environment
where decisions were made quickly and where it was permissible to make mistakes.
“If you were wrong, you got a heck of an education and you probably didn’t make that
mistake again. If you were right, you were so far ahead of everybody else that it was a
major coup for the company.”
Early errors by McCain Foods included a foray into the popcorn business. The
product was called Pop-a-Doodle and
had a sweet topping on it. One Christmas,
the McCain marketers had the
bright idea of offering two-foot-long
bags of Pop-a-Doodle coloured red and
green. Almost none sold.
In the 1970s, the company operated
a snack food division with a factory
in Saint-André, close to Grand Falls,
producing potato chips. But the freight
costs to major Canadian markets were
too high to gain a significant market
share, so the business was sold. McCain
then decided to focus exclusively on frozen
foods, which it produced at its original
plant in Florenceville and at a bigger
one in Grand Falls, opened in 1971.
Like other McCain veterans, Morris describes the early days as fun. Part of that
fun came from participating in an ambitious project: to build McCain Foods into
the biggest french fry producer in the world. “If Wallace and Harrison had started to
make eyeglasses or footballs, they’d have had the same vision – to be the biggest in
the world,” says Morris. “They would have had the same goal and they would have
accomplished it. Because they were very ambitious. And just a helluva lot of fun to
be around.”
Yet Morris also recounts a brutal work schedule: “I am not kidding when I say we
worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.” But the work was enjoyable because
everyone pulled together. “Lots of times there would be two truckloads that had to go
to Toronto or somewhere and there weren’t enough bodies to load the trucks. So we’d
all go over, Harrison and Wallace included, and load trucks.”
Some managers would view hard labour as beneath them. But Wallace and
Harrison weren’t professional managers. They were entrepreneurs with everything
riding on the success of their fledgling company. For them, loading trucks was a way
to make good on promises to their customers, to earn the respect of their employees,
and perhaps most important of all, to learn the business.
In later years, they took what they had learned in Florenceville around the world,
to France and South Africa and Argentina and many other countries, where they
18 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 19
McCain switchboard
operators Helen Hallett
and Mabel Carter.