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From: "Peter McCrae" <>
Subject: [CAN-BC-OBITS] Fw: MCCAIN: Harold Harrison McCain mar,2004
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2007 23:54:09 +0100


Harrison McCain
(Filed: 20/03/2004)
The Daily Telegraph and the telegraph.co.uk



Harrison McCain, who died on Thursday aged 76, built the largest oven chip
empire in the world in the small Canadian town of Florenceville.


He did this with his brother Wallace. But although the family cherished its
privacy, the two had a public falling-out which resulted in their lives
being splashed across the pages of newspapers across Canada and wherever in
the world they did business.

Although the brothers had two white houses next door to each other across
the river from their firm's first plant, they became so estranged that, when
Wallace heard that Harrison had had a heart attack, he told a reporter that
he had been informed that his brother had lost between 30 lb and 40 lb, but
had not seen him.

McCain Foods started up in 1956, and a year later had 30 employees taking in
potatoes at one end of their plant and churning out 1,500 lb of French fries
every hour at the other.

It is true that they were helped by a 17.5 per cent tariff on processed
potatoes coming from the United States and by the growth of fast food
restaurants, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds. But the business
was an immediate success, thanks particularly to Harrison's aggressive
tactics, which were said to have ensured that the McCains owned practically
everything they could see in Florenceville. What they did not own they ran.
What they did not run they had under contract; and anything they did not
own, run or have under contract they watched very carefully indeed.

The company made $152,678 in sales during its first year and $6.4 billion in
2003, by which time it had 16,000 employees and was said to produce
one-third of all the world's oven chips. It has also expanded into pizzas,
frozen dinners and drinks.

Harrison McCain, who once reckoned that he spent 140 nights a year in the
sleeping compartment on the McCain corporate jet, opened a sales office in
Britain in 1965 and built a British factory four years later, around the
time that he took the business over the New Brunswick border to Maine. For
the past 20 years it has even made French fries for the French.

The son of a seed potato exporter, Harold Harrison McCain was born on
November 3 1927 at Florenceville, which is located in a perfect
potato-growing region.

Young Harrison went to Florenceville High School where, aged 14, he raised
money to build a hockey rink, before reading Economics at Acadia University.
But instead of joining his two older brothers in the family firm he became a
salesman for a drug company, before being hired by K C Irving, New
Brunswick's richest man, to work for Irving Oil there, and in Newfoundland
and Prince Edward Island.

When their father died in 1953, leaving the brothers $40,000 each, Harrison
and Wallace, who was three years his junior and six inches taller, built the
French fry plant which became the subject of the bitter family feud 35 years
later. Harrison and Wallace each owned a third of the company and their
older brothers owned one-sixth each. This became the flashpoint in the late
1980s, when the brothers both shared the title Chief Executive Officer, but
ended up in court in a row stemming from a dispute over whose son would
succeed them. The rest of the family sided with Harrison, and Wallace was
expelled, though he kept his shares and, in the latest edition of Forbes
magazine, Wallace is several millions richer than Harrison; though both were
billionaires.

Harrison McCain was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1984, and
a Companion in 1992. He was a director of the Bank of Nova Scotia, the
Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and the National Gallery in Ottawa as well as being
a life member of the Potato Association of America.

Harrison McCain married Billie McNair, the daughter of a premier of New
Brunswick, who died in 1994. The couple had five children, one of whom,
Peter, president of McCain Foods International, died in 1997 after crashing
his snowmobile during a late-night outing on the family airstrip at
Florenceville.



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