How McCain Foods Uses Big Data

Big data was something McCain Foods discovered by chance.

In fact it was a concept its director of agronomy Dr. Yves Leclerc wasn’t even familiar with until about a year and a half ago.

“What happened really was we have some research projects and those projects appeared to be in the realm of big data,” says Leclerc, who will be speaking at the Big Data Congress in Saint John, New Brunswick next month. “But we did not necessarily go looking for a big data project to start with.”

Those projects were with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and New Brunswick startup Resson. The projects examined all the variable factors that can affect crop growth by the company’s producers – everything from the soil to the crop itself.

Yves LeClerc:
 

“These projects are really designed at the farm level.”

“We’re working with growers and the idea is to be able to increase the yield of our growers to able to secure competitive raw material.”

Data has always been important to McCain Foods. Leclerc says a famous phrase founder Harrison McCain used to say was: “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” But today there is more data than ever for the company to leverage.

Yves LeClerc:
 

“We’ve always been a company that used data to make decisions and making process … that concept of measure to manage has always been part of our DNA.”

“As we enter into more technology and more possibility it just increases the realm of data you have to deal with.”

With so much new data to learn from, it would be hard for many companies to leverage by themselves. Leclerc says that’s why McCain Foods works with startups like Resson. Not only does McCain get to leverage big data, they also get to help a very promising local startup.

Yves LeClerc:
 

“They’re bringing some technology and some knowledge which is not within McCain,” Leclerc says. “Being able to work with people like them really broadens our ability to understand our crop and to better be able to manage it. Their expertise is not something that we had internally.”

Leclerc will dive deeper into how McCain’s uses big data during his talk at the Big Data Congress in October. But he also plans to touch on some the challenges the company faced learning how to do so. It’s cool, but not easy.

Yves LeClerc:
 

“There is obviously a learning curve with big data, but also with technology. We’ve been working with drones now for about 3 years and it’s not as simple as what we thought initially. There’s a lot of hurdles we had to overcome to actually make that data meaningful.”

“It’s an area that is fast-evolving, that is changing and I would say some of the initial promises of the technology are not necessarily [fulfilled] yet. I can see that in the future they will be, but it’s not as simple as turning a switch and you get the information.”