potatoes.meWhat One Engineer's Career Reveals About French Fry Megaprojects
Mike spent eight years leading capital projects at McCain Foods — including two of the world's largest French fry factories — then left to advise the industry broadly through Projex Consultants, a pattern that points to a real gap between in-house engineering capacity and the specialized project expertise large-scale processing expansion actually requires.
The scale claim
Building the World's Largest Fry Factories
Capacity expansion in French fry processing is not a matter of pouring concrete and installing fryers. Mike, who spent eight years leading capital projects at McCain Foods before founding the consultancy Projex Consultants, lists the actual obstacles he faced: regulatory approvals, tight budgets, aggressive schedules, competing priorities, large and distributed teams, and supply chain disruptions. Two of the projects he led became, by his own account, among the largest French fry factories in the world.
What stands out is not the scale claim itself but the list of frictions attached to it. None of them are engineering problems in the narrow sense — they are coordination problems, and Mike treats them as the real substance of the work. The projects added substantial capacity and revenue while achieving world-class safety performance, an outcome he frames as the product of managing those frictions rather than avoiding them.
The career path
A Global Apprenticeship
Mike's path to McCain wasn't a direct one. Fresh out of engineering school, he took a junior role doing plumbing and HVAC design at a small consulting firm — work he'd studied engineering partly hoping to avoid, since he'd never pictured French fries as a career. That evolved into an eighteen-month assignment in India, supporting a new McCain Foods potato processing plant, followed by a similar posting in South Africa with a wider scope. Both postings read as formative rather than incidental: India built his cross-cultural and cross-time-zone resourcefulness; South Africa, with more scope and stronger results, built his confidence to run larger projects elsewhere.
That sequence — junior engineer, then international postings, then a full-time role managing capital projects across North America — is a fairly conventional path inside a large multinational processor. What it gave him, by his own telling, was technical range plus the communication and management skills to be trusted with bigger projects at other manufacturing sites.
The pivot
From Corporate Engineer to Independent Advisor
The more consequential turn came with the decision to leave. He founded Projex Consultants, in his own words, to relieve corporate fatigue, spend more time with his family, and broaden his impact by helping other processors accelerate their growth. Outside the boundaries of a single employer, he describes gaining a wider view across the entire industry — a vantage point he frames as a source of insight unavailable to someone still embedded inside one company.
This is a familiar pattern in capital-intensive industries: deep operational experience inside one large firm becomes the credential for advising many smaller or differently positioned firms afterward. Mike now offers his services to processors at any stage — fledgling or established — as well as to vendors serving the industry.
The industry read
What This Signals for the Processing Industry
Taken on its own, this is one engineer's career. Read against the backdrop it describes — megaproject construction inside a major processor, followed by a departure to serve the wider market — it points to a structural gap: processors building or expanding capacity may need specialized capital-project expertise that doesn't scale efficiently as a permanent in-house function at every company. An independent consultancy built on experience from inside one of the largest processors is positioned to fill exactly that gap.
- Eighteen months on a McCain Foods plant project in India
- A follow-on assignment in South Africa with expanded scope
- Eight years at McCain Foods managing projects across North America, including two of the world's largest French fry factories
- Challenges named: regulatory approvals, tight budgets, aggressive schedules, competing priorities, distributed teams, supply chain disruptions
- Departure to found Projex Consultants, serving processors and vendors industry-wide
As processors keep building larger fry plants, the coordination challenges described here — regulatory approval, budget, schedule, and supply-chain friction — recur regardless of company size, and the emergence of independent capital-project consultants suggests the industry is starting to treat that expertise as a shared, sourceable resource rather than something every processor must build in-house.
What kind of work does Projex Consultants describe doing?
Projex Consultants helps potato processors and industry vendors plan and execute complex capital projects, drawing on founder Mike's experience managing plant construction across multiple countries.
What made the two French fry factory projects at McCain Foods difficult?
Regulatory approvals, tight budgets, aggressive schedules, competing priorities, large and distributed teams, and supply chain disruptions were the core challenges, according to Mike, who led both projects.
Why did the founder leave a large processor to start an independent consultancy?
The move let him step back from corporate fatigue, spend more time with family, and gain a broader, cross-industry perspective — in his own words, insight he wouldn't have gained by staying inside one company's projects.