From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

ABOVE: Wallace and Dick
McWhirter in Australia, 1968.
FACING PAGE: A sampling
of the product line of the
early 1970s.
Harrison was a superb salesman. We both did a lot of
sales work, and we sold the product,” says Wallace. Fortunately,
they had little competition. Zeropac, a Quebec
company, was the only other processor of standalone
frozen french fries in Canada at the time. Fraser Vale, of
Chilliwack, British Columbia, produced frozen fries but
only to include as part of a package of fish and chips.
The early years were ones of constant travel across
Canada for Wallace and Harrison. Each spent around
150 nights a year away from home. Usually, at least one
of them was on the road. After Morris and Bliss arrived,
the brothers knew the factory would be in good hands, so
both of them often travelled at the same time. Harrison
and Wallace sometimes had to walk down the production
line to borrow travel money from the workers. There were
no credit cards, automatic teller machines, or extended
banking hours then, and the employees knew how important
the sales trips were to the company’s success. “Harrison would get two dollars from
one person and five dollars from another,” says former employee Florence White. “He
would always pay back the money. The faith everyone put in him was amazing.”
In the 1960s, North American demand for french fries was growing by around
20 percent a year. This demand was fuelled by the explosive growth of quick-service
restaurants. One early McCain customer was A&W, which opened its first Canadian
restaurant in Winnipeg in 1956. But the biggest buyer was Kentucky Fried Chicken.
At the time, most Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets were using fresh potatoes for their
french fries, as many continued to do until the late 1970s. However, Wallace and
Harrison persuaded some outlets to switch to frozen. Wallace recalls: “When we went
to a town, the first thing we asked was, ‘Is there a Kentucky Fried Chicken here?’ They
were big users.” At the time, the individual franchisees made their own decisions as to
which french fries to use; such decisions are now made by the corporate office.
These early sales trips were gruelling. Harrison and Wallace quickly figured out
that winning over chefs was the quickest way to success in the food service market.
So they spent their days on the road demonstrating frozen french fries to chefs in
restaurant kitchens. After a day of demonstrating, their clothes smelled of frying oil.
To get rid of the odour, they hung their suits out the windows of their modest hotel
rooms to air out overnight.
This was the beginning of the end-user system of selling to the food
service industry that became one of the most important drivers of McCain’s
success in Canada and around the world. Like many great ideas, the enduser
system is common sense. The traditional way for a manufacturer to get
its product to a customer is to convince a distributor of its worth and leave
it to the distributor to sell it. But the distributor has lots of products to sell.
So why not go directly to customers with just one product – yours – and
demonstrate its superiority?
Dick McWhirter, a salesman who came to McCain in 1960 from
Kellogg, perfected the end-user system. The purpose of the system, which
is still used by McCain salespersons all over the world, is to persuade
chefs who have always prepared their french fries from fresh potatoes
that frozen fries are a better choice. This was especially difficult when frozen
french fries were still a novelty. Chefs had always prepared fries from
fresh potatoes and doubted that a frozen product would be accepted by
their customers. Moreover, fresh potatoes were cheap – around one and
a half cents a kilogram at the time, while McCain was asking nine cents a
kilogram. Why pay more for processed, frozen ones?
The best way to make the case for frozen fries is to do a side-by-side
comparison. The salesperson has the chef peel, cut, and cook fresh potatoes.
The raw potatoes are weighed before being prepared and the oil
level in the frying pan is measured. Meanwhile, the McCain rep prepares
the frozen fries. Then he or she compares the preparation time,
the weight of the finished product, and its appearance, taste, and texture.
Finally, the sales rep calculates the per-serving cost, including labour, of
each method.
In this test, the advantages of McCain frozen french fries become clear.
The chef sees that the apparent lower cost of fresh potatoes is illusory:
once fresh potatoes have been peeled, cut, and cooked, ten kilograms of
potatoes yields less than two kilograms of fries. Frozen fries absorb less
oil than fresh fries and take less time to prepare, thereby reducing labour
costs. Moreover, their quality is more consistent throughout the year. In
the spring, for example, raw potatoes that have been in storage for months
tend to be high in sugar, resulting in soggy fries that are unappetizingly
dark. And of course there is another advantage: with frozen fries, there are
no peels and starchy water that need to be disposed of.
22 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 23