From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Wallace and Harrison at the
Florenceville plant, 1970.
for their summer holidays. “There wasn’t any Trans-
Canada Highway then,” Ash told The Star in 1987. “The
main road went right alongside the McCain plant. Each
year I drove by, the company was larger. I always had in
my mind that at some point in my career I would like
to join a company that had started out small and was
expanding.”
In 1965, an employment agency was advertising for
a comptroller. The ad didn’t name the company but did
say it was located in northwestern New Brunswick near
good hunting and fishing. Recalls Ash: “I said, ‘It can
only be McCain Foods.’” After he applied for the job,
Wallace and Harrison McCain invited him for an interview
and hired him.
The fly-fishing suited Ash, but the budgeting process
at McCain Foods needed work. One manual accounting
machine served the entire company. “They had virtually
no systems at all,” Ash told The Star. “You have to plan where you are going and
you have to know what your costs are – it was a real challenge because there wasn’t
anything to start with.”
Ash designed the management control report (MCR), which Bruce Terry, who became
director of finance in 1990 and later CFO of McCain Foods Limited, describes
as “the bible of the company.” Ash had been trained in standard cost accounting at
Dominion Bridge and he introduced that approach at McCain. “Standard costing
drives you toward understanding where you are overachieving and where you are
underachieving,” explains Terry. “Underachievement is where you are losing. So this
approach allows you to identify and focus on the big issues.”
Bill Mabee, who was vice-president of finance and later succeeded Ash, played an
important role in the successful implementation of MCR, working with managers of
the different functions within the company to help them get used to the new system.
“They all needed to learn to speak the language of the other disciplines,” he recalls.
Mabee spent a lot of time with Carl Morris translating McCain’s manufacturing processes
into a system of administrative control.
Wallace and Harrison soon became strong believers in the MCR and used it to
help them guide the company’s fortunes for more than four decades. “At every
monthly management meeting we combed through the variances in the MCR,” says
Terry. And the MCR created a low-cost mentality
at McCain which, in Terry’s view, drove the
company’s worldwide success. “In manufacturing,
he who has the lowest costs wins. You have
to market, you have to do everything else right,
but if you can’t do it at the lowest cost, somebody
else can ultimately copy you and take
away your business.”
Yet another early hire who became a McCain
mainstay was Paul Dean, who arrived in 1959 to
take charge of quality control. A native of upstate
New York, Dean studied food science at the
University of Georgia and turned down eight
job offers to come to Florenceville and work for
McCain. Recruiting highly qualified individuals
to come to out-of-the-way Florenceville has
always been a challenge but, in Dean’s case, the
location was an attraction. He came for the climate, preferring the cool Canadian
weather to what he would have experienced had he chosen to work for Coca-Cola in
Atlanta or one of the other U.S. companies that wanted him.
Like Carl Morris, Dean thought at first that the ambitious McCains might be overreaching.
“Harrison would say he was going to be the largest french fry producer in
the world. I used to roll my eyes. I didn’t think it was possible because the Americans
were so big. But he had great single-mindedness of purpose. He put the blinders on,
and he was headed right that way.”
Dean echoes many employees who say that one of the satisfactions of working for
the company was the variety of the work. “It was management by crisis. You never
knew what you were going to be doing on a given day.”
There was an urgent purpose to it all – the desire to keep getting bigger and better.
But this came with a price: hard work that could wear a person down. “We couldn’t
get enough help,” Dean recalls. “We were always short of production people and supervisors.
So we worked six or seven days a week. Harrison and Wallace worked that
way, and they expected everyone else to. I just got worn down.” Dean left McCain
for the federal government food research station at Kentville, Nova Scotia, where he
worked for six years before returning to McCain.
Like Terry, Dean believes that attention to detail, especially on the cost side, has a
28 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 29
Wallace and Harrison
discussing robotics in 1972.
By 2007, most of McCain’s
packing departments were
roboticized.