top of page
7dea01b37dd7fd96d93b49ea8c9ec202_edited.jpg

Frank Gibson

Frank has been advising international companies on business issues for more than thirty years. Over this period he has undertaken assignments with more than one hundred different international companies doing business in the Asia Pacific region. The majority of this work has been dealing with complex business problems across a mix of market entry, strategy development, marketing, and sales and distribution issues. He also has extensive experience in assisting multinationals to acquire local operations and assets.


He has worked with major companies from across the globe and remains closely connected to the challenges that international companies face in Asian markets.  While Frank has worked across different sectors he has particularly deep experience in food and agriculture. This includes working across the value chain for many international food producers spanning farming through to consumer marketing. He has deep current experience developing route to market strategies for major companies.  


Frank is a Mandarin speaker and has degrees in the social sciences (University of New South Wales), economics (University of New England), and an MBA (Australian Graduate School of Management). He has also sat on a number of Boards including the Beach Heads Board (New Zealand Government China advisory), and Ocean Mates (which operated a resort business in the Philippines).  He has also previously held senior executive positions with Lion Nathan and a Li & Fung JV.  He started his consulting career in Australia with ACP (Australian Consulting Partners) which was a successful boutique strategy firm formed by BCG/McKinsey alumni in the late 1980s. He later opened and ran offices for them in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
 
Prior to entering the private sector, Frank held a number of senior economic policy positions in the Australian Government (Foreign Affairs and Trade and Social Security). He lives in Brisbane with his wife Zhang Heyi and their two children.
​

Xavier Naville

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 Asia.

​

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.  He currently lives in Taipei (Taiwan) and allocates his time between Asia and the West Coast of the United States.  He was previously a member of the French Junior national fencing team.  He speaks fluent French, English and Chinese and is proficient in German.

Mike-Chen.jpg

Mike Chen

Mike worked with Xavier for ten years at Creative Food. During that period Mike lead the company’s operations and supply chain, managing a team of several hundred employees, building and running 10 plants across China. 

​

He created and managed a network of grower partners for Creative Food across Jiangsu, Yunnan, Hubei, Guangdong, Fujian, Shandong, and Hebei provinces. Thanks to Mike’s work, Creative Food is now sourcing fresh vegetables around the year from a total planted base exceeding 20,000 mu and spread over multiple regions. He actively managed and supervised a network of growers as well as Creative’s own four farms. 

​

Every day, despite weather conditions, shipments of fresh vegetables arrived at Creative plants across China to be cut, cleaned, packaged and shipped within 24 hours to the largest foodservice chains in China. A total of more than 3000 restaurants belonging to the world’s most demanding foodservice brands relied on this supply chain for their key menu items such as burgers, sandwiches, wraps, soups, and salads.

​

Mike is a graduate of Nanjing Audit University. He started as an accountant in Nanjing in a government-owned company. After reaching senior levels in the government hierarchy he moved to the private sector and joined Colgate. Starting as a sales representative and working his way up to more senior positions. When he left Colgate in 1998, Mike was running the company’s sales in seven provinces, managing a network of more than 100 distributors. Subsequently, he joined Henkel and led its sales expansion in 11 provinces, representing half of the company sales at the time. 

​

Mike’s familiarity with the decision process in the government helped Creative Food secure strong support wherever it operated. His ability to build and manage a strong supply chain was a key to Creative’s success. Since leaving Creative Food with Xavier in 2011 Mike has worked on many agri-business supply chain projects with Xavier and Frank.  Mike is a Nanjing native and has residences both there and in Shanghai.

​

bottom of page