From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

TOP: The September 1967
edition of Executive magazine
featured the McCains.
BOTTOm: George McClure,
1970.
They were bringing home only $100 a week when employees
such as Frank Hickling were earning $150. Everything the company
earned was being ploughed back into it. “Some people are
in business to clip dividends or make a certain amount of profit,”
Harrison told Canadian Business magazine. “We’re in business
to grow.”
By the end of the 1960s, growth was well underway. In his
1968 Christmas message to employees, Harrison remarked that
McCain had already become the largest frozen vegetable company
in Canada and one of the largest frozen french fry producers
in the world.
Much bigger companies saw what the McCains were accomplishing
and wanted in. Heinz, Imasco, General Foods, and others
offered to buy McCain Foods. The brothers could have sold
and retired from fourteen-hour workdays to lives of leisure. “We
never considered it,” says Wallace. “It never crossed our minds.”
For them, building a great business was more fun than sailing or
playing golf.
“You’re in love with the game,” Harrison explained to Executive magazine. “The
game is action, what’s going on. There’s something new all the time – buying companies,
building factories, hiring guys, motivating people, seeing advertising programs,
taking positions on commodities, borrowing money, settling lawsuits.”
George McClure, an economist who had held senior government positions, joined
McCain in 1970. He was attracted by the energy and optimism that the company’s
leaders brought to work with them every day. They were going to do big things and
nothing was going to stand in their way. “It was a sense,” says McClure, “of ‘the world
is our oyster.’”
Maritimers are international traders. Their own home markets are too small to
sustain large businesses, so they need to look elsewhere, not only west to the rest of
Canada but south to the United States and east across the Atlantic. It did not escape
the notice of the McCains that the freight rate from New Brunswick to England was
lower than the rate to Vancouver. Nor did they fail to observe that nobody was making
any serious attempt to sell frozen french fries to the British, a nation of chip eaters.
A vast market was there for the taking.
“Our dad was an exporter of seed potatoes and he taught us the world is small,”
Harrison McCain told the Toronto Star in 1975. “We were lucky to have our vision of
the whole world as a market. Our business succeeded because we didn’t want to sit
here on our arse in New Brunswick.”
Being part of the McCain team in its first decades was exhilarating, in part because
the McCains were so quick to pounce on new opportunities. “It was ready, fire, aim,”
says McClure. “We were out to dominate the processed-potato business in the world.
It was a crazy goal but we just had an intuitive feeling that we could do it. It was a
remarkable feeling, and you can’t duplicate that in many jobs … The best thing and
the thing that appealed to me most was a great sense of adventure.”
As the 1960s progressed and the company continued to grow, the McCains were
having far too much fun to even think about selling the company. The adventure was
just beginning.
34 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 35
Florenceville employees
celebrate McCain’s twentyfifth
anniversary.