McCain is after a lion's share of China's fast food market

The average Canadian eats 30 pounds of french fries per year. In China, per capita consumption is less than 3½ ounces.

McCain Foods Ltd. is trying to turn the figures for Asia's largest country around.

And there is hope for McCain, whose biggest fast-food restaurant chain clients, KFC and McDonald's, are seeing exponential growth in China - a country of 1.3 billion people.

Just over 20 years ago, McCain felt the Chinese market wasn't strong enough to warrant setting up a french fry factory.

KFC and McDonald's were just breaking into China in the late 1980s and neither were posting figures that would entice McCain to move in as an on-the-ground supplier.

In the mid-'90s, though, business started to pick up and McCain began selling into China seriously.

By 2005, it had built its own potato processing plant to help meet demand.

Now, the company says it is the largest producer and supplier of both domestically produced and imported frozen potato and appetizer products in China.

Terry Bird, vice-president of corporate development and emerging markets, predicts that less than two decades from now, Asia alone is set to match the scale of McCain's entire global operation.

"Last year, we did $6.5 billion in the world with 20,000 employees at 60 factories,"he says.

"We see Asia, the potential for Asia, being as big as our whole company in 10 to 15 years' time."