Shane Parrish

Here's how it went.

They'd walk into a restaurant and ask the chef to peel, cut, and cook fresh potatoes right in front of them.

Then they'd weigh the raw material, factor in the cooking oil, and calculate a true cost per serving.

including the labor.

Next, they'd prepare frozen fries and invite the chef to taste them side by side.

When you accounted for waste, prep, time, and wages, frozen fries were actually cheaper, and the quality was consistent year-round, unlike fresh potatoes, which degraded after months in storage.

It was a beautiful piece of selling because it didn't argue, it demonstrated.

The chef did the math himself and arrived at Harrison's conclusion.

They started locally, knocking on every door they could find.

In Harrison's words, we went from restaurant to restaurant, from cafe to cafe, and hotel to hotel being thrown out mostly.

To save money, they stayed in cheap motels.

By evening, their clothes reeked of frying oil.

Dry cleaning was out of the question because it was too expensive, so they hung their suits out the motel windows to air them overnight.

Even while scrambling, Harrison never cut a corner on integrity.

Here's one story that tells you who he was.

A McCain Foods marketing employee heard through the grapevine that Coca-Cola was planning to introduce a mixture of five citrus juices that had already succeeded in the U.S.

market.

So he registered the trademark five alive in Canada before Coca-Cola could.

Several months later, the president of Coca-Cola contacted McCain Foods to purchase it.

When the issue was raised with Harrison, his response was immediate.