From their father’s small packing plant, PEI’s potato-farming Griffin family built one of Canada’s greatest agri-business successes

IN 2012, W. P. Griffin Inc. received an Atlantic region Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in recognition of their vision, leadership, financial performance and social responsibility. And for the past two years in a row, company president John Griffin was named one of Atlantic Canada’s top 50 CEOs for being an enthusiastic innovator.

When asked about what one of PEI’s most successful potato growers is doing winning awards for business acumen, John pauses, then stammers, “Um, well yeah, that’s hard… hard to answer.” A look into the history and operations of Griffin Farms provides the answers John seems too humble to offer.

When John accepted the Ernst and Young award, he did so on behalf of his brother Peter—the company’s vice-president—his family and their staff, which, split evenly between the fields and the packing plant, numbers 50 in peak season. W. P. Griffin is equal parts successful farming operation and savvy marketing company. It’s this balanced approach that has allowed the family farm to expand and become a thriving farm and packing business.

Farm family history

The Griffin family business was not born on a farm. It began in 1947 when Griffin patriarch Wilfred Patrick quit the teaching position he’d held for a year and landed a job as business manager for a potato packer in Elmsdale, PEI. He was 19. Peter understands his father’s decision.

“Back in the day, a teacher wasn’t a great position—most boarded at somebody’s house. The pay wasn’t great,” he says. “He found the potato industry more of a challenge.”

Within 11 years, Wilfred owned the company. In 1969, he incorporated as W. P. Griffin Inc., and for nearly 30 years, he and his wife Marie, who worked in the office, expanded the packing plant and their farm from an acre or two to 1,000 acres. And they raised four children: John, Peter, Eleanor and Barbara.

In 1997, a year after their father passed away, John and Peter officially took over the business, though they’d been working with their dad since the early 1980s. Their mom died in 2013. Today, all four of Wilfred and Marie’s children work for the company. One of John’s children works there too, as do two of Eleanor’s. Troy Smallman, the farm manager and Eleanor’s husband, is in his 25th year.

John has fond memories of growing up on the farm, though many of them seem to be about work. “We used to have cattle, so in the summer, we used to help bale and store hay,” he says. “We grew up next to the packing plant, so grading potatoes was a big part of what we did as kids.” Because Peter and John were always so involved on the farm, the transition was seamless when they took the helm.

“There was no big takeover. I’ve been working here since 1981, making decisions. Our father taught us well,” says Peter. “I remember years ago, my dad told me to go and buy a new tractor—he put the trust in me to do that. He taught us how to take on responsibility at a young age. The first time I drove a tractor I was probably just old enough to see over the steering wheel.” Peter still works the fields when he can, running the tractor and the potato truck in the fall. “I like to get my hands dirty,” he says.

Today the Griffins farm 4,000 acres on a patchwork of fields in PEI, Canada’s largest spud-producing province at 1.4 million acres farmed.

They also work with partner growers across the Island. In 2014, the company planted 1,700 acres with 15 varieties of potatoes like Russett Burbank, Annabel and Rooster. About half of these will end up as Cavendish french fries, but the other half, plus those they buy from other growers, will be sold in dozens of forms on the retail and food service markets. The 50 million pounds they harvest every fall fill 15 storage houses, enough to keep the packing plant operating almost year-round.

Risky business

In 2004, John and Peter took a million-dollar risk. Griffin’s packing plant had become obsolete. The equipment and layout were causing bottlenecks so they gutted and rebuilt the facility from the roof to the wiring.

“We realized it wasn’t working the way it was,” says John. “Every time we brought a new product on, it was slowing down our plant, slowing down our efficiency and our waste was going sky high.” Six months later, the Griffins had a versatile, modern packing facility.

Today, John has no regrets. “It was the right move at the right time. We’d never go back.” In fact, the Griffins went forward, quickly reinventing their business. The year after the big reno, they added an optical grader—the first in North America.

The grader is a computerized sorting machine that takes pictures of each potato as it passes through a light box to determine size and other characteristics. It kicks out potatoes that are sunburned, diseased or damaged. With the addition of seven new holding tanks to stock the packing plant with seven potato varieties at a time, switching from one packing job to another became quick and easy.

Leading an industry

Eleanor Griffin’s daughter Ashton Perry (who’s also Peter and John’s niece) takes me to a field of endless rows of potatoes. Mauve-flowered Rooster potatoes grow to her right and white-flowered Vivaldi potatoes to her left. It’s mid-season, and many of the potato flowers have already fallen, but the spuds beneath the ground are not yet full size.

Even at eight months pregnant, Ashton has no trouble stooping to tug at a Vivaldi until she pulls the plant and attached spuds from the sandy, stone-free red earth.

The Griffins’ relentless innovation has changed the way Canadians buy potatoes. There’s no better represention of that than the two potato varieties—Rooster and Vivaldi—surrounding Ashton. Bred in Ireland, the Rooster is a red-skinned variety with yellow flesh and the best selling potato in the UK.

“If [Rooster] becomes a household word like it has in the UK, it’s going to be a very big deal,” says John. “We’re working on a launch this fall at Walmart stores in Eastern Canada and the US.” The Rooster is now sold at 3,000 Walmart stores across the US, and W. P. Griffin is the exclusive packer for Eastern Canada.

Perhaps the most visible change the Griffins will bring to potato marketing in North America is colour coding. Milk containers are standardized by colour—whole milk in red, skim in blue—and John wants to see the potatoes sold the same way.

Sobeys customers can already buy Griffin-packed, colour-coded bags of potatoes, which come in red for baking, blue for mashing, green for boiling and gold for baking. This is where the Vivaldi comes in—it’s another European variety, grown specifically as a mashing potato for those blue bags.

Land and community

While the Griffins aren’t organic farmers, they do claim to showcase sustainable farming practices. “We try to exceed standards wherever we can,” says Peter. “Right from day one, we realized our bread and butter was the land. One of the first things our dad got us to do was soil samples.”

John also speaks of his concern for the land and “keeping the soil on the field.” He says that even a few decades ago, farmers weren’t always aware of healthy farm practices like planting hedgerows, installing grass waterways and buffers, and using techniques to reduce soil erosion and runoff.

Although they aren’t required to, the Griffins plant cover crops like rye and wheat to hold the soil through winter. The rye is plowed under in spring as a green fertilizer and the wheat harvested the following fall.

“Our father started the business in the late 1940s,” says John. “And we want to respect his work by maintaining the farm in a good, healthy manner. We hope that when we retire we’ll still have a good healthy farm to hand off.”

Social and community responsibility are also important to the Griffins. In the past couple of years, they’ve helped fundraise for causes such as the local hospital and a nearby children’s camp.

In a partnership with Sobeys, they raised more than $70,000 over the past two years for the Canadian Potato Museum, just down the road from their farm. Through Sobeys, they sold almost 300,000 bags of specially marked spuds, donating $0.25 a bag to the museum.

Still, it’s not for community efforts, but for the ways they are reinventing the potato in North America that they are certain someday to be inducted into that same museum’s Potato Hall of Fame.