Dr. Meng Li is the Founder and CEO of Landed Foods, helping Chinese food brands and manufacturers enter and scale in the U.S. With over 15 years in the U.S. food industry, she served as Director of Food Science at Eat Just, Inc., where she helped scale a $60M business. Dr. Li also led product at CellX and served as CPO for Mourish, driving U.S. market entry with deep expertise in Chinese manufacturing systems and cross-border supply chain operations. She brings regulatory experience from the FDA (CFSAN) and is now based in San Francisco, focusing on end-to-end U.S. market entry for Chinese food companies.
Dr. Meng Li previously served as a Product Director at a Silicon Valley-based food unicorn valued at approximately $1 billion, where she led a product that scaled to around $400 million revenue over six years. Through years of hands-on experience, she came to believe that the United States represented the ceiling in food innovation, brand marketing, and scale-up.
In 2024, she returned to China as a senior advisor. Expecting to “bring back advanced experience”, she instead encountered a sharp reversal in perspective. Chinese companies, she observed, are now operating at a different level in terms of product iteration speed, supply chain responsiveness, and ingredient and process innovation. At the same time, she noticed a subtle but meaningful shift in the U.S. market: in the city where she has long lived, more China-made food products are appearing on retail shelves, and American consumers are becoming increasingly open to “Made in China”.
In this talk, Meng will not focus on tactical “how-to” strategies for Chinese food exporting. Instead, she will reflect on the moments that challenged her assumptions and reshaped her thinking, and explore a more fundamental question: as China’s capabilities in the food industry continue to advance, when and how, will their true global value be fully recognized?