Podcast with Xavier Naville, author of “The Lettuce Diaries: How a Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables in China”

Xavier Naville

Many Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove any pretensions that one can easily transplant a foreign business model into the Chinese market.

 

 

The Lettuce Diaries: How A Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables in China, Xavier Naville (Earnshaw, August 2021)
The Lettuce Diaries: How A Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables in China, Xavier Naville (Earnshaw, August 2021)

One of these entrepreneurs was Xavier Naville, who moved to China in 1997 where he built Creative Food. Unlike many others, his venture was a success. It’s now a key supplier to major restaurant chains across the country including McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks.

The Lettuce Diaries: How A Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables In China tells Xavier’s story growing Creative Foods: managing a Chinese team as a foreign manager, trying to work with farmers to improve how they conducted agriculture, and navigating investor demands.

In this interview, Xavier and I talk about his time in China, what he learned about starting a business, and whether things are different in a more developed, more advanced economy.


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.