CEO Corner with Xavier Naville

The New Zealand Business Roundtable in China (NZBRiC) is delighted to announce an upcoming CEO Corner event featuring acclaimed author Xavier Naville and his latest book, "The Lettuce Diaries: How a Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables in China." Xavier, an accomplished business leader with a wealth of experience in executive positions across global organizations, will share insights from his engaging memoir, offering valuable lessons for entrepreneurs venturing into the Chinese market. His book serves as a practical guide, emphasizing the significance of cultural understanding and adaptability while doing business in China.

We invite you to join us for an enriching discussion on Wednesday, September 18 from 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm at Shanghai Xuhui Association of Foreign Invested Enterprises Event Venue (No.70, Yongfu Rd. Xuhui District (inside the courtyard)). The conversation will be moderated by a member of NZBRiC's Board. NZBRiC would like to thank the support of Kea on this event and acknowledge the venue sponsorship from Shanghai Xuhui Association of Foreign Invested Enterprises.

About the author

Xavier Naville started Creative Food, a key supplier to major restaurant chains in China (e.g. McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks). He grew the company to what is now an organization with 9 factories serving 6,500 restaurants a day and $150m in revenue. If you ate soups, sandwiches, or salads at Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut or McDonald's in China, you have likely eaten Creative Food products. He sold the company to Bakkavor PLC from the UK in 2007 and ran the business until 2011.

Xavier is now a principal at Vision Management Consultants and works on numerous strategy and M&A projects in the food sector for multinationals in China and other countries.

As a CEO & Leadership Teams coach, he also helps small and mid-size business leaders to scale their organizations faster with measurable results. He is the author of The Lettuce Diaries, a business memoir about his years in China's food industry.

PRAISE FOR THE LETTUCE DIARIES

"In this astonishing, soulful, moving, and often funny memoir-cum-business-primer, Xavier Naville tells the story of how he traded the boardrooms of Paris for the agricultural fields of China, along the way building one of the country's largest fresh- food companies. Word by word and acre by acre, Naville learned how to speak, and to operate, in Chinese. The Lettuce Diaries traces Naville's journey from the industrial kitchens of Shanghai to the red-baked earth of the Inner Mongolian plateau as he encounters hostage-takings and an attempted coup, food-safety scandals, fraudulent suppliers, cutthroat rivals, loyal colleagues, and spends many hours in the vegetable fields of China with the farmers whose traditions and practices shape the food we eat every day. The Lettuce Diaries is a story of where China has been, where it's going, and why it matters to all of us."

— Leslie T. Chang, author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China