From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

McCain chicken picnic,
1973: (left to right) Harrison,
Tim Bliss, Carl Morris, Dick
McWhirter (his face partially
blocked), and Archie McLean
(vice-president of marketing).
Sometimes, an unconvinced customer offers to take a
case to try out the product. “If he does that, you know
you are not going to keep the customer,” says Wallace. “So
you say, ‘You’ve got to use this for a month before you can
know for sure.’ If you can hold the customer for a month
– we have found from experience – he has let the guy
who ran the peeler go, so that restaurant won’t be going
back to raw potatoes.”
McWhirter was the second salesman hired by
McCain. The first, Ralph Orr, also came from Kellogg.
Orr worked the Maritime provinces while McWhirter
was based in Hamilton, Ontario. A third salesman, Peter
Laurie, worked out of Ottawa. One day when Laurie
was visiting the Florenceville headquarters, Harrison
challenged him to a sales contest in nearby Woodstock.
The challenge was to see who could sell the most product on the main street, with
each taking one side of the street. Harrison won but, says Laurie, that was because
Harrison knew Woodstock better than he did and picked the side with the most
potential customers.
McWhirter was appointed sales supervisor for Ontario, then national sales manager.
In 1969, he became vice-president of sales. Like Carl Morris, McWhirter left a
huge American company to come work for a small Canadian one. In a Star interview
in 1983, McWhirter said he had two reasons for joining what was then an almost
unknown company. First, he could see that grocery stores were starting to install
frozen food sections and he thought frozen foods had big potential for future growth.
Second, he was impressed by the McCain brothers.
As a Kellogg salesman, McWhirter had never had to demonstrate how to prepare
Corn Flakes, so selling frozen french fries was a new challenge for him. “When I
talked to a chef, I was selling to the buyer who bought the product, cooked the product,
tasted the product, and served the product. No hot air – I had to know my facts
and sell with enthusiasm.”
One of his major responsibilities, at a time when McCain was just beginning to
assemble a sales force, was to find people who would excel at selling products whose
worth was, to many, still unproven. Just because someone had worked at a major food
processor such as Campbell, Kraft, or Kellogg was no guarantee that person could
sell McCain frozen french fries. Quite a few did join up, McWhirter said. “Just like
24 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 25
Harrison
During the latter years of the 1970s, fundraisers in Toronto
were busy calling Canada’s captains of industry to solicit
money for the construction of a new home for the Toronto
Symphony Orchestra. In exchange for the largest donation,
they were offering naming rights for the spectacular
new hall designed by prominent Canadian architect Arthur
Erickson. Among those called was Harrison McCain. Would
he be prepared to contribute $5 million in exchange for the
right to name the new hall?
“Yes,” he said, “I would. Name it the Florenceville Dance
Hall and you’ve got your money.”
The offer was declined and instead the new building
was named Roy Thomson Hall, in honour of the late media
magnate, in exchange for a $4.5 million donation from the
Thomson family. Paul Tellier, a long-time member of the
McCain Foods board, is sure that Harrison would have written
a cheque if Toronto’s cultural elite had been willing to
accept the colourful name he proposed.
Harrison McCain was almost as famous for his sense of
humour as for his brilliance as an entrepreneur and businessman.
The stories of his escapades would fill a book.
In the mid-1960s, Stanley Wagner visited Harrison
in Florenceville. Wagner owned Caterpac, a British food
distributor that McCain Foods wanted to acquire. He was
known as a jokester, so Harrison thought he would play a
joke before Wagner had a chance to. As Harrison described
the episode years later in an interview, he and Wagner
talked in his office at McCain Foods until late afternoon.
Harrison then invited him home for dinner. On the way,
they drove through Florenceville’s low-income neighbourhood.
Harrison pulled into the driveway of an unkempt,
decrepit house and said, “Well, here we are.”
Wagner was speechless.
An old woman was hanging out underwear on the
clothesline, the garments flapping in the wind. Harrison
said, “There’s Billie hanging out my drawers.”
“Stanley’s mouth dropped open,” Harrison recalled.
“He didn’t know what to say.”
Harrison contentedly watched Wagner “writhe and
suffer” for a minute. Then he backed his car out of the
Harrison, Connie Bliss, and Shirley Morris sing Christmas carols at the
Florenceville McCain Christmas party, 1970.
driveway and drove home, where Harrison’s wife, Billie,
awaited them.
Harrison was good at seizing opportunities to have
some fun. James Downey, former president of the
University of New Brunswick and a close friend, told the
story of Harrison’s visit to a posh restaurant in London,
England. He was standing near the door waiting for a
friend, and, as usual, was nattily dressed. An older man
accompanied by a young woman arrived and, mistaking
Harrison for the head waiter, asked to be shown to a quiet
table. “This way, sir, madam,” said Harrison, leading them to
a table and taking the order for “champagne.” Harrison then
informed the head waiter of what he had done and conveyed
an order for the most expensive bottle of bubbly.
For Downey, this story told a lot about Harrison McCain
– quickness of mind, acting ability, and sartorial elegance
combined with a lack of pretension. “Most of us, and certainly
most CEOs, would have felt sufficiently offended to
be mistaken for a waiter that we would have put the snotty
gent to rights immediately.”