[Movers & Shakers] Eric Monge is Disrupting Food Delivery in SH

Movers & Shakers is a column where we profile the people making things happen in Shanghai: entrepreneurs, creatives, artists, and whoever else is influencing industries and spaces and making things move and shake in this city.

There is an argument that happens in Nuvi's kitchen most days, and the annoying thing about it is that both sides are right.

On one side, the chefs. Five-star hotel veterans, one of them a French cook with a long Shanghai resume behind him. Their position is uncomplicated: food should taste good. On the other side, the dietitians, who have ruled that there will be no cream, no butter, and no refined sugar. Sweetness comes from whole fruit or it does not come at all. Salt is a pinch of Himalayan pink and nothing more, which means flavor has to be dragged out of paprika, truffle powder and herbs instead.

"They argue," says Alice, Nuvi's COO, who has to live with both camps. "The chefs say, my job is to make the food taste good. I don't care what your job is!"

I should disclose where I was for all of this, which was at a table, eating. Lunch was a Tuscan chicken pasta, a chilled peanut-coconut soup, Greek yogurt with strawberries and passionfruit, and a papaya and oat milk smoothie.

It did not taste like diet food. That's the honest verdict, and it surprised me, because I arrived at this assignment mildly braced. Anything shelved anywhere near the word "wellness" in this city tends to cost a fortune and taste like nothing to look forward to. Nothing here was doing the aggressive-virtue thing. It was just lunch. And lunch was good.

Which brings us to the number, because the number is the whole story. Nuvi starts at around 390 yuan a day. That's something when you compare it to what you might spend for a full set of meals (and snacks) on Meituan which gets delivered in twenty minutes. Some people spend a fraction of that in a day, some people… come close to, or even exceed.

Let's talk about Eric… the Mover & Shaker of this op…

Eric Monge is French and British, has been in Shanghai for about two years, and is, on paper, one of the stranger people to have opened a food business here. It takes a minute to explain why.

He trained as a financier at Bordeaux: two master's, international economics and finance, then international trade and banking. He started his working life in the diplomatic service, as commercial attaché at the French Embassy in Casablanca covering telecom and IT. Then a run through the multinationals. Product management at Esselte. Marketing for the Kensington brand at ACCO, then regional business development across Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, where he turned a 30 percent sales decline into 35 percent growth. By 2000 he was Managing Director for Lyreco across Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg: 150 million euros turnover, 300 staff. He was only 30 at the time.

Then the interesting part. In 2001 he walked away from all of it to build a company in London called Savoria, importing premium Italian food. Not a shop though. A multichannel importer and distributor of Italian artisanal produce, running a just-in-time supply chain stitched together out of more than 500 small producers scattered across Italy: cheeses, cured meats, extra virgin olive oils, coffee, delicatessen. It went out to private customers through an e-shop and into top restaurants and delis across the UK. BBC Good Food and the Sunday Times food supplement both ended up pointing readers at it as the place to find the authentic version of the thing. He ran it for nearly nine years, at 40 percent operating margins.

"Already then I had built a brand one can trust for what it stands for," he says. "The real thing."

After that, an executive MBA at London Business School, then Moscow, where he spent about a decade, including two years turning around the Russian arm of Manutan: an industrial supplies group pushing 200,000 product references through a website, a catalogue, a call centre and a sales force, with order processing wired directly into clients' own accounting software. He was GM of it through the years when the EU was starting to make trading with Russia genuinely difficult, which is a particular flavor of hard.

Then Paris, for his wife's career, and a year at the École Ritz Escoffier on Place Vendôme learning to actually cook.

So: finance, diplomacy, three decades of building distribution systems that deliver very specific things to very specific people on time, one previous food company with a genuinely difficult supply chain, and a classical culinary diploma from the Ritz. Then he moved to Shanghai and had a look around.

CNS: You'd been running multinationals your whole career. Where did the cooking come from?

Eric: We were passing through Paris for a couple of years, which prevented me from engaging in anything meaningful, apart from finding one of my passions, which is cooking. The Escoffier school is the professional school of the Ritz Vendôme. All the kitchens and catering operations are below the hotel, and the school is on one of those floors. You go through cooking, pastry and culinary training, but you also work the hotel operation: banquets, breakfast, the brasserie, the restaurant. When you come out of there, you are a fully trained chef. They mainly take people who already have a background. They don't take young people. They take people capable of absorbing a lot in one year.

For me, I always had sports. In a corporate life that was how I dealt with stress. And very quickly you realize nutrition is an integral part of that: your stress, your sleep, your ability to be a functional individual.

CNS: And then you arrive here in Shanghai after training in the kitchen…

Eric: Yes! And I was shocked. In the capital of the world, which is Shanghai, which has everything, better than lots of places, I couldn't find a service that delivers my meals of the day calibrated to the fact that I am busy and I know what it means to eat healthy. It was impossible. These services exist in other major cities, but not here in Shanghai.

And God knows here you can wake up at any hour, place your order on waimai, and it comes in half an hour. But if it takes twenty, twenty-five minutes to arrive, that means the restaurant has five minutes to cook it. That's called fast food. It can't be healthy. Tell your grandmother to cook you something in five minutes and you have a challenge.

The part where he refuses the premise

Here is where I have to be honest about how this interview went, because I walked in with a word ready and he took it off me.

I'd been describing Nuvi as disruptive. Eric stopped me on vocabulary.

Eric: I wouldn't say this is an offer that is disruptive. Disruptive implies there are incumbents that are going to be undermined or replaced by a different way of doing it. Nuvi fills a gap.

Which is a strange thing for a founder to say to someone who is offering to call him a disruptor, and it's the moment the conversation got good. His argument is that the gap sits between two groups. There are people who develop an awareness that they should eat better and then follow whoever shouts loudest about being healthy (a lot of us have these folks in our Instagram feeds) there is no legal definition of healthy food, he notes, only codes: a salad, some green, a nice font. And then there are the people he calls achievers, who aren't after the appearance of it and want the result.

Eric: When you want to execute on dietary knowledge, you either do it yourself, or you source food and you don't really know what's in it. What Nuvi does is execute on dietary knowledge, for you. The only nutrition worth following is the one that works for you. What you need to eat is not what Alice needs to eat, or what I need to eat. Different DNA, different lifestyle, different health status. So anybody projecting out there that this is the healthy way to eat is already misleading, because the right way to eat is by definition adapted to the individual.

Now, fair complication, because this is where I say "but wait...". Meal delivery services do exist in Shanghai. Several of them. Some are decent. So the claim needs narrowing, and when pushed, Eric explains: what doesn't exist here is a service that operates in English and Chinese, that has solved customization at scale instead of selling you three fixed boxes, and that has registered dietitians inside the production loop rather than beside it in the marketing.

Okay... bilingual service, meal customization that can serve a large client base, and dietitians enabling the customization for each client. Interesting. And yes... different.

The engineering problem

Everybody wants to sell customisation though, don't they? Almost nobody wants to operate it. Personalization is easy at 10 clients and a nightmare at 200, because every allergy, every calorie target, every "I don't like boiled eggs" is one more branch on a production tree that some human being has to hold in their head at six in the morning. Nuvi... interestingly, at four months old... is already operating with "hundreds of clients"... an exact number which COO Alice says is confidential at present. But their kitchen space is huge, located on the second floor in the extended shops area of the Shanghai Centre.

Nuvi's answer took eighteen months to build before a single meal went out the door. Which, as Eric points out, is not how restaurants work.

Eric: A restaurant doesn't prepare in a year and a half. You assemble a chef, in a few months you have a restaurant, you have a menu. It took us a year and a half, because we put together two things: taste, and a delivery system where you are motivated to stay on your diet day in, day out. I trained at Escoffier. The food had to taste good.

What that year and a half produced, in the amount of detail he was willing to give me (he was polite but firm about not opening the hood, and asked me not to be frustrated by the answer), is a set of master recipes designed with flex built into them, plus a client profiling system, plus software that marries the two into a daily production instruction for the kitchen. Every client fills out an onboarding questionnaire (intolerances, preferences, activity level, objective, any diagnosis they choose to share), then talks it through with a dietitian. That profile goes into the machine. The machine tells the kitchen what to make and how to portion it.

Then everything gets cooked fresh and blast chilled, 60 degrees down to about 5, fast. Nothing frozen, nothing sitting. It arrives cold and you reheat it when you want it, which Eric argues is a feature rather than a compromise.

Eric: The perception here is that unless it's delivered waimai, it's not fresh. But if your food is already in your fridge, you reheat it in three minutes. You have a conference call with the US, you come home, you have fifteen minutes before your next call. You choose exactly when you eat.

CNS: How far does the customisation actually go?

Eric: We have a client who cannot eat boiled eggs. If the egg is mixed into something, that's fine, but boiled, she can't. We are not there to be normative about preference. We are there to make sure that what you eat is calibrated for you.

Some clients share a medical diagnosis with us. The classic ones: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity. Because we have registered dietitians in house, they can take that and adapt not just the calories, which is the easy dimension, but the composition of the meal.

CNS: Well... speaking from experience here, meal plans fall apart the first week someone has a business dinner... or two...

Eric: In Europe or the US these plans tend to be a bit radical. They know you should eat this way every day, and they force-feed their format onto you. Here... in Shanghai, you know perfectly well, Jacob, that it would not work. People in Shanghai want a bit more freedom. They need it. The city moves fast, so flexibility has to be part of the model. So each week we can reshuffle however the client wants. Better that you have as many healthy meals as you can, rather than none while you wait for a perfectly clear week.

Alice adds that lunch-only is a perfectly acceptable order, if that's the shape of your life. Many of the client base are athletes, she says, with executives after that. An athlete might be eating 3,000 calories a day, which costs more, and which is a useful reminder that this is not primarily a weight loss product no matter how hard the market will try to read it as one.

The other half of the problem is boredom, which is what actually kills every diet anyone has ever been on (I can sometimes be caught groaning, when I smell chicken in the airfyer...). Nuvi's answer is that they don't repeat a meal for 60 days. At five meals a day, that's north of 300 recipes in rotation, split across a Western line and an Asian one (not strictly Chinese: Korean, Thai, handmade soba). Most clients take both. Mediterranean on Tuesday, Asian on Wednesday. There is an eggplant lasagna that Alice talks about the way people talk about a first apartment.

"We figure after 60 days, you forgot what you ate two months ago," she says.

Nuvi wasn't built just for Eric...

There is always a question "why start this business in Shanghai, or China for that matter". In Eric's case, it might be a temptation to chalk this up to this being "something to do" for a trailing spouse. But Eric at one point, began to praise the quality of products here in China that equally inspired him to build Nuvi.

Eric: When you take vegetables, protein, there is a large spectrum as to what you can source in the country. Most of our sourcing is in China, by the way. It's nonsense to air freight things, China has a rich ecosystem enough.

CNS: You're talking about the quality of ingredients in China?

Eric: Exactly. There's no question about that. China, has some of the best quality produce.

CNS: You're not the first person to mention this. This surprises people sometimes.

Eric: It may be that people just don't know yet that there are great things produced in China, I mean at very high levels of quality, but it is true, you have a lot of sources for fantastic vegetables, fantastic protein, be it fish, be it beef, be it chicken.

CNS: How do you find the ones worth using?

Eric: The sourcing is supported by members of the team, among them an executive chef who has been operating in Chinese F&B for twenty years plus. They have the operational experience of which channels are reliable, professional, with high standards of traceability and quality assurance. This is the only way in China. Long standing experience is what allows you to distinguish the one speaking well from the one truly delivering.

So... 390 yuan a day?

Alice is the other half of this story and arguably the reason it has a shot, because she has already solved this exact problem in this exact city, twice.

She was part of bringing Starbucks into China, opening stores here in 2000. Later, Häagen-Dazs.

Alice: People hear 390 for food delivery. But we are not food delivery. It's like when we started Starbucks. 22 yuan for a cup of coffee. We weren't selling coffee, we were selling the third place, the brand. In '99 when we did the branding, it was like putting an LV purse on your table. People would just leave the cup on their desk all day. With Häagen-Dazs we sold it as affordable luxury.

I have been here long enough to remember when that cup genuinely did function as a handbag, and she is not wrong about it. Whether daily meal delivery can pull the same trick is an open question, but in this day and age... health and nutrition is a trend that likely will not be fading away anytime soon.

She is also refreshingly unromantic about diets, having personally been through most of them.

Alice: I've been on the juice diet, where you just drink juice all day. I hated that one. I did lose 10 kilos, and I gained 15 back, because it's not sustainable. You can't drink juice forever. I've done Atkins, Mediterranean, the acupuncture thingies. Everybody's been on a diet. And when you hear the word diet, it's just chicken breast and lettuce.

"And broccoli," I said.

"And broccoli."

Eric, for his part, has opinions about diet culture that go somewhat past the commercial. Get him onto OMAD (one meal a day, currently enjoying a moment on social media) and he will walk you through insulin peaks and cortisol for several unbroken minutes, ending on the observation that the people posting about how incredible they feel have never once had their cortisol measured. Whether or not you buy the biochemistry, it is a useful signal about the person: he is at least as interested in arguing against bad nutrition as he is in selling you good nutrition.

Turns out Nuvi couldn't have been started anywhere, except Shanghai

Nuvi is four months old. In those four months, not one client has left. Everybody who started is still eating.

What is impressive, is the timeline that has seemingly come out of Eric, the renaissance man (engineer, finance, operations, chef). It's the most impressive thing in this story and it's easy to skip past. He landed in Shanghai roughly two years ago as the trailing spouse, which is a category this city knows well and usually files under "figuring it out." Eighteen months of that went into building this before a single meal left the kitchen: recipe development, a client profiling system, software to marry the two, a dietitian team, an executive chef with twenty years behind him, and supply lines assembled from scratch by people who know where the good produce actually is. He did not spend his first year here having lunches and taking meetings. He hit the ground running and did not stop.

He also wouldn't open the hood on the system for me, which, honestly, fair. You don't spend a year and a half building something market innovating, just to spill the beans publicly to a market that is hyper competitive.

And the direction of travel here is the part worth sitting up for. Shanghai imports a lot of concepts. We are very used to the shape of it: something works in London or New York or Tokyo, somebody brings a version of it over, we all go and try it. This isn't that. Eric used services like this in other capitals, found them standardized and dogmatic, and built the better version here, in this city, with Chinese ingredients and a bilingual kitchen and both culinary codes running side by side.

"You find the capacity to cook tasty things with high quality product in China, absolutely," he says. "You have producers."

The chicken in my pasta ran about five times the per kilo price of the cheapest chicken on the market. Before you ask: you could tell.

So what you have is a financier turned diplomat turned multinational MD at 30, who walked away from all of it to run an Italian supply chain out of London, then Moscow, then went and earned a chef's diploma at the Ritz in his fifties because he felt like it, and who has now built something in Shanghai that does not exist in Paris or New York. Somebody is going to look at Nuvi in a couple of years and open one in Europe. Maybe. Nuvi... might be something, that only China can do.

That's the good stuff. That's the whole reason this column exists, to profile the city's Movers & Shakers. Know one we should sit down with?