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Referring to billionaire entrepreneurs Wallace and Harrison McCain as the sons of a potato farmer was often intended as a slight. The notion of potatoes might seem mundane, but the McCain brothers defied such perceptions. From a former cow pasture in New Brunswick, they built one of the world’s largest frozen food empires. During the 1990s, the siblings had a dramatic falling out, resulting in one of the most acrimonious family feuds in business history, proving that the potato business could be anything but dull.
McCain Foods, founded by the brothers, stands as the leading global supplier of frozen French fries and ranks among Canada’s largest companies. Despite their business success, the rift between Wallace and Harrison persisted until their passing, with neither willing to set aside their differences.
Years after their legendary feud, tensions have once again surfaced within this notable family. Despite a typically Canadian preference for privacy, the McCains have been embroiled in a fair share of scandals.
At the forefront of these controversies is Wallace’s daughter, Eleanor McCain, a wealthy singer-songwriter. About ten years ago, she sought to annul her marriage to her orchestra director husband, Jeff Melanson. Eleanor accused Melanson of being a “media whore,” alleging that he deceived her into marriage and was a hard-drinking, habitual cheater. She claimed he even used a Mozart-themed pseudonym to navigate the Ashley Madison adultery website.
And none more so than Wallace’s multi-millionaire singer/songwriter daughter, Eleanor – who a decade ago tried to ‘annul’ her marriage to her orchestra boss husband. Branding him a ‘media whore,’ she claimed Jeff Melanson not only ‘tricked’ her into marriage but was a hard-drinking, serial cheat who cruised the Ashley Madison adultery website under a Mozart-themed pseudonym.
This time, in the grand tradition of her late father, she has clashed – spud-peelers drawn – with fellow members of the McCain clan after she announced her intention to sell her stake in the ‘privately-owned, family-driven’ company.
McCain Foods, which boasts that it sells one in every four fries consumed in the world, has been valued between $16 billion and $22 billion.
Toronto-based Eleanor, 56, whose brother Scott is the company’s chairman, wants to focus on ‘philanthropy and for portfolio diversification and estate-planning purposes,’ said a spokesperson. She is asking for a payout of more than CAD $1 billion, equivalent of USD $725 million, which would have to be met by her siblings, cousins and their offspring.
Eleanor McCain (pictured in 2015) is asking for a payout of more than CAD $1 billion, equivalent of USD $725 million
McCain Foods, which boasts that it sells one in every four fries consumed in the world, has been valued between $16 billion and $22 billion
However, those other family members insist Eleanor – who has no involvement in the day-to-day running of the business – has overvalued her stake in the empire.
Sources told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper that the refusal of Eleanor’s cousins to give her what she wants can be traced back to her father and uncle’s dispute in the early 1990s. That battle, which was finally resolved in 1994, ‘left wounds that have not healed after 31 years,’ and Harrison’s children are still angry with Wallace’s children, the insiders said.
The dispute also reflects the difficulty in working out the precise value of each family member’s share in a private company like this one.
Business analysts have speculated that her cousins and siblings may be arguing that the company will go deeply into debt if it meets her demand. One solution might be for the company to go public and issue shares.
Negotiations are continuing, but neither Eleanor nor her family, which has been estimated to have a combined value of at least $13 billion, have shown signs of budging.
Unless a settlement can be thrashed out under McCain’s complicated management structure – in which a two-tier board was set up to cushion the company from family disagreements – another costly and draining McCain vs McCain court case beckons.
Eleanor said in a statement that she is ‘simply exercising her unrestricted right to sell her shares, the exact same right available to all other shareholders in the company.’ A friend of hers told the Financial Times: ‘There’s a lot of emotion, this business was co-founded by her dad. It’s a big thing to walk away from.’
Beyond a bland statement saying the family is trying to treat all shareholders fairly ‘with a view to balancing the interests of all stakeholders and the long-term interests of the company,’ other McCains haven’t commented on the issue.
However, it’s clear that its latest advertising slogan, ‘Everything is Golden,’ hardly applies to the family that owns it. (In fact, its original catchphrase – ‘Ah! McCain, you’ve done it again’ – might seem more appropriate).
Insiders say this rift within the family is just a continuation of a long-running feud between the two branches of the clan.
Wallace and Harrison co-founded McCain Foods in 1957 in Florenceville, a small farming town in New Brunswick, setting up one of the first factories to process potatoes.
The brothers – whose forebears hailed from the Irish-Ulster borders – both had large families. Harrison had five children – Mark, Ann, Peter, Laura and Gillian – while Wallace had four – Scott, Michael, Martha and Eleanor.
The company grew quickly, in part because its fries were cooked longer before being frozen, giving them a richer taste than US imports.
Within four years, the company’s products were on sale in England where it soon became even more famous for frozen pizza.
It would eventually supply frozen fries to McDonald’s, Wendy’s and KFC around the world. It now sells nearly $12 billion of frozen food a year in 160 countries. Its current chief executive is a family outsider, Max Koeune.
Wallace and Harrison co-founded McCain Foods in 1957 in Florenceville
The company would eventually supply frozen fries to McDonald’s, Wendy’s and KFC around the world
Wallace had four kids – Scott, Michael, Martha and Eleanor (pictured with her father)
Wallace and Michael McCain are pictured at a Maple Leaf company meeting in 2004
Like other battles inside family business empires, the original McCain sibling feud was sparked by the succession issue.
Wallace was determined that his son Michael (Eleanor’s brother) succeed as the company’s boss.
Harrison instead wanted to bring in his nephew, Allison, who ran the British arm of the business. Harrison was furious when he discovered his brother had unilaterally moved in 1990 to ensure Michael succeeded them as chief executive.
Critics said the brothers were pugnacious egomaniacs. Harrison, charmless ‘bulldog,’ was a nightmare for interviewers. Once asked to describe his secret to success, he replied: ‘Right place, right time. Next question.’
A fierce battle ensued which cost the family $15 million in legal and other fees. In 1994, Wallace lost and was ousted as joint chief executive with Harrison, although he retained one-third ownership of McCain Foods and was appointed vice-chairman.
Wallace would later complain that he was ‘unceremoniously dumped’ and that his demotion was ‘vindictive.’ Together with his sons Scott and Michael, he salvaged a little of their injured pride by orchestrating a takeover of Maple Leaf Foods in Toronto. It would later become Canada’s biggest processed food maker.
Harrison, meanwhile, further riled Wallace by appointing his son Peter as president of a new subsidiary, McCain Foods International. In 1997, 39-year-old Peter died after crashing his snowmobile as he drove it on the family’s private airstrip at Florenceville, which remains the company’s corporate headquarters. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ his stricken father said at the time.
Although the two sides of the family continued to run McCain Foods together, they never reconciled.
When Harrison and Wallace were both honored at a business awards ceremony in Toronto in 2003, outsiders wondered whether it might be the moment for a burying of hatchets.
However, it didn’t happen as Harrison – who’d suffered a heart attack three years earlier – was too ill to travel. Meanwhile, in his speech, Wallace made it very clear that he hadn’t forgotten or forgiven.
‘I’m not going to candy-coat that situation,’ he said. ‘It was a very hard thing for me to endure, to watch such a successful partnership go down the drain the way it did.’
Harrison, who named his nephew, Allison, as his successor, died in 2004 and was followed seven years later by Wallace.
It certainly isn’t the first time Eleanor McCain has made headlines.
In 2016, she took legal action against her estranged husband, Melanson, then chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. She said he’d actually already ended their marriage after just nine months in an email to her.
Eleanor asked for an annulment – effectively meaning that the marriage never existed – which would have spared her from paying him CAD $5 million as part of their pre-nuptial agreement.
In 2016, Eleanor took legal action against her estranged husband, Jeff Melanson (pictured), then chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Eleanor asked for an annulment – effectively meaning that the marriage never existed – which would have spared her from paying him CAD $5 million as part of their pre-nuptial agreement
Michael (center) was ordered to pay his ex-wife nearly $130,000 a month after a judge struck down a marriage contract that was designed to keep the McCain family wealth within the bloodline
She sensationally claimed he was a manipulative, dishonest and emotionally unstable skirt-chaser who had ‘tricked’ her into marrying him after an ‘aggressive courtship.’
She accused him of drinking at work and giving jobs to his lovers. He also allegedly frequented the controversial adultery website Ashley Madison during their marriage under the username Sarastro2012 – a reference to Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.
Melanson, who dismissed her allegations as ‘inaccurate,’ countered that Eleanor was demanding, difficult and had a hair-trigger temper.
He also accused her of describing local people who tried to access a public beach near her multi-million-dollar summer home on the coast of Nova Scotia as ‘low life’ and hiring security guards to stop them. (She insisted she never used such language and said she was simply deterring trespassers, later winning a court battle over access to the beach.)
When observers noted that the pre-nuptial agreement was inconsequential to Eleanor, whose net worth was estimated at $270 million, her lawyers insisted she wasn’t simply motivated by ‘vengeance.’
In 2018, an Ontario judge ordered a divorce between the couple – Eleanor didn’t get her annulment and, although the settlement was undisclosed, insiders said Melanson did not get the $5 million that had been promised him.
But hers wasn’t the first McCain divorce to drag the privacy-conscious family into the limelight. In 2013, her brother Michael – then chairman of food giant Maple Leaf Foods and the sibling their father had wanted to take over McCain – was ordered to pay his ex-wife nearly $130,000 a month after a judge struck down a marriage contract that was designed to keep the McCain family wealth within the bloodline. It was the biggest spousal support award in Canadian history.
The contract had been reportedly imposed by Michael’s father, Wallace, who had threatened to disown his children if their spouses didn’t sign away their rights to spousal support in exchange for a cash payout.
The divorce battle between Michael and Christine, his wife of 30 years, heard extraordinary details about their marriage and lavish lifestyle.
Their annual household budget, which covered a half-dozen staff and the upkeep of several holiday homes as well as their 80-foot yacht, came to nearly $2 million, the court heard.
They took dozens of trips a year, usually by private jet, many of them to the McCain family compound in Jamaica. A week-long trip to Mustique alone cost them approximately $66,000. Christine spent nearly $177,000 a year on clothes and almost $33,000 on flowers. Americans may not be shocked by such extravagance, but many Canadians certainly were.
Michael at one point admitted in an email to Christine that they were ‘spending money like drunken sailors and need to own this.’
Even if he didn’t follow his own advice, he liked to sit their five children down and discuss their family’s values. One of his aims, he said, was to prepare them for the ‘benefits and burdens of wealth.’
And the McCains certainly seem to place a high value on their money – as yet another legal battle may soon confirm.