McCain Foods Hopes To Woo Younger Consumers With Sustainable Fries

What could French fries possibly have in common with the Metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFT's), the global climate crisis, and a trendy California restaurant? A lot, if McCain Foods gets its way. As the world's largest producer of frozen French fries, with 60-plus years in the potato processing business, the family-centric Canadian company is on a mission. One with game-changing goals for how agricultural practices impact future generations, especially when it comes to spuds.

In a news release via Cision, McCain unveiled a plan to change the way next-gen consumers and growers view food farming and its related global impacts. The catch-all term embodying the new goals is "regenerative agriculture," which FarmRaise explains as "The use of agricultural management techniques that promote healthy soil and help to reverse climate change by conserving and rehabilitating agroecosystems and food systems." Unlike organic farming, which focuses on growing healthy foods, regenerative agriculture/farming targets the farming systems themselves, optimizing natural resources and reversing climate change along the way.

McCain Foods digs even deeper with specific regenerative ag principles that apply to potato farming, and by taking their sustainable fries, known as Regen Fries, to the places where young people hang out, explains Cision. There's also a tech component to the venture, which raises the experience to surreal new levels.

Lofty goals and creative thinking go hand in hand. At least it appears that way with McCain Foods, which has made a bold commitment to incorporate regenerative agriculture into 100% of its own global potato acreage by the final months of 2030, according to Cision. To ensure these principles take root and spread to future generations, they've launched the #SaveOurSoil initiative and two accompanying ventures.

The first is a collaboration with the wildly popular NFT-themed Bored & Hungry restaurant in Long Beach, California, which uses NFT images from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection for its logo and corporate identity, according to Entrepreneur. The eatery also accepts cryptocurrency as payment for food, including the new McCain product known as Regen Fries. Though the special fries grown with regenerative agriculture practices will feature on the menu for only a few weeks, the joint venture by McCain and Bored & Hungry is going global with popups in London and Toronto.

Spuds get a longer run in the second prong of McCain's plan: a free virtual potato-growing game on the Metaverse platform Roblox. The Farms of the Future game integrates into Livetopia, a top-10 Roblox title, and gives players the power to grow virtual potatoes using regenerative agriculture practices. Rewards ensue for things such as rotation of livestock grazing and the planting of cover crops, which the Soil Health Institute recognizes as crucial to developing healthy soils.