French fry king Harrison McCain dies at 76

FREDERICTON, New Brunswick – Harrison McCain, a New Brunswick farm boy who became the king of the frozen french fry, died late Thursday night in a Boston hospital after a long illness. He was 76.

McCain made his home in Florenceville, New Brunswick, a sleepy farming community that he and his younger brother, Wallace, transformed into the command center for one of the world’s largest frozen food companies.

When Harrison and Wallace started McCain Foods Ltd. in 1956, nobody imagined it would grow to employ more than 13,000 people in dozens of processing plants on four continents, with annual sales of at least $6 billion.

McCain has a plant in Easton, Maine, where it has 470 employees and is one of Aroostook County’s largest employers. The company is considered to be the single largest buyer of Maine potatoes.

McCain Foods is the world’s undisputed french fry king and produces one-third of the planet’s frozen french fries.

Harrison McCain was the bulldog of the company. Pugnacious and tough, some regarded him as a brash and unpleasant egomaniac. Others saw him as a true captain of industry, a no-nonsense business genius who commanded respect around the world.

When asked to describe the secret of his success, he barked back, “Right place, right time. Next question.”

For Harrison McCain, that was an unusually long and effusive answer. Typically, he’d tell reporters that his business was none of their business.

That jealously guarded privacy ended, however, in the mid-1990s when a bitter succession feud between Harrison and Wallace boiled over into the courts and the public domain.

Harrison was livid after Wallace unilaterally named his son, Michael, chief executive of McCain USA in 1990.

After a litigation war that cost $20 million in legal fees and assorted expenses, Wallace was ousted from his job in 1994. He landed on his feet in Toronto, orchestrating a takeover of Maple Leaf Foods with his sons Scott and Michael.

There was never a reconciliation. Harrison carried his grudge against his brother and his brother’s family to his deathbed.

Wallace and his family still own about a third of the shares of McCain Foods.

Harrison named his nephew, Allison McCain, son of his late brother Andrew, as his successor in 2002.

Harrison was predeceased by his wife, Marion, who died in 1995 after a battle with cancer.

His son, Peter, the president of McCain Foods International, died in 1997 after crashing his snowmobile during a late-night outing on the family air strip in Florenceville.