The Sudden Death of a Viral Bakery, and Six People's Wretched Summer

Everyone tells the story of how bad it was a little differently. No one can explain why it happened.

Editor's note:

Every event gets fragmented, flares into a trending topic, and is just as quickly forgotten. Now that this era has arrived, remembering has become more valuable.

We want to be the people who remember. "Stories of 2017" is one of the most important series QDaily runs all year.

Laurent Fortin, former Farine production director; David Fortin, Laurent's brother

Laurent Fortin set up a LinkedIn account. For this baker from L'Eure, France, it was hardly an urgent move. He was 49; his family had baked bread since his grandfather's day, serving only local customers; he had seen little of the world beyond France.

But that small, seemingly pointless gesture sent his life careening off the rails.

Far away in Shanghai, the French businessman Franck Pecol was thriving. His bakery, Farine, was one of the city's hottest viral spots, and he needed someone who understood the craft of French bread inside and out to run his production. Laurent Fortin's LinkedIn profile caught his eye.

In December 2016, Laurent Fortin left France for Shanghai. It was his first time in China. Franck Pecol handed him a flourishing operation: a central kitchen, oversight of production at five Farine stores, the job of developing new menus, training staff, and checking quality at every stage. It was an enormous amount of responsibility. "He told his family many times that he wanted to quit, because there was too much for one person to do," a colleague said. But neither the grand career nor the resignation came in time. Three months later, he and seven others were criminally detained on suspicion of producing and selling substandard goods — chiefly the use of expired flour.

From March 22, 2017 to the time of writing, Laurent has been locked up for 181 days. He has now spent far longer in a detention center than he ever lived in Shanghai.

Laurent Fortin's brother, David Fortin, 41, also a baker, had only one thing left this summer: saving his brother.

It was no easy task — least of all for David, who could not even tell "China" from "Asia" as a concept. He was up against two governments so vast they had no visible shape.

"His family understands nothing of China's tangled legal system. You can imagine the pressure and the helplessness they're feeling," said Simon Leplâtre, a reporter for the French newspaper Le Monde who had interviewed them.

David Fortin was barred from calling or emailing his brother. In six months he received only three of Laurent's letters, all through the French consulate. In one the family received on July 17, Laurent described being held in a cell, sleeping on the floor every night, unable to take his medication on time, and mentioned his "terrible back pain." Yet at the end he resolved to keep enduring: "Even though this is deeply unjust, my mind has finally begun to accept the situation." Afterward, the French consulate managed to secure a chair for Laurent's cell.

At first the story stayed inside China. Part of the reason was the "instructions" David's family had received from the French consulate: "The consulate told us not to talk to any media, to keep a low profile, not to make any noise." After all, the Chinese government has little fondness for the press and did not want the matter to swell into a diplomatic incident.

Six months on, every reply David got was the same: "everything is still under investigation." Only then did he grasp that silence and waiting would not free Laurent. On August 8, David launched an online petition, calling on French President Macron and Foreign Minister Le Drian to rescue his brother, still imprisoned in China. As of writing, it had gathered 65,000 signatures. Only then did people learn that Farine's owner had fled — and that someone was still behind bars.

In the petition, David noted that Laurent had raised hygiene concerns with his superior, Marion Cambronnet — Farine's second-largest shareholder and the owner of the Minhang central plant — but Marion had told him to drop the hygiene questions and concentrate on ramping up production. Marion was among the original eight arrested, but won bail on the grounds that she had two young children. Production director Damien Hortal was also released on bail. Only this Frenchman — the one who had been with the company the shortest time, on a one-year contract — remained in custody. "Everyone abandoned Laurent. He became the scapegoat."

The petition quickly drew coverage from Agence France-Presse, France's largest wire service, and dozens of French outlets and English-language media followed. After David had written ten letters to President Macron, the petition finally won him a reply from the president's chief of staff: "The French consulate is aware of the matter and is trying to resolve it."

But the French government had taken up a game of pass-the-parcel. When David passed this message to the French consulate in Shanghai, the response was: "Who is this person you contacted? Who gave you this information?" Nothing more came of it.

David also tried reaching Farine's owner, Franck, who answered with a shrug: "Don't worry, it's just a fine." By David's account, Franck had already safely moved his assets and his brand from China to Europe. "He just made sure he had no connection to any of this — he's not coming back to China. But he never stepped up to take responsibility, and he never gave us any help," David said.

David has now given up trying to talk to Franck. He even doubts that Franck's return to China would change anything, since "he has no power, no real say."

In his most recent letter, dated September 3, Laurent's situation had worsened: he told the family that on September 17 he would begin a hunger strike in prison. To stand with his brother, David decided to go on hunger strike too, from the other side of the world.

Meanwhile, David was also hunting for a formidable Chinese lawyer and planning to fly to Shanghai within two weeks to visit Laurent. The French consulate in Shanghai had granted the family a single visit. David said he would bring French reporters to cover the whole trip. "Just wait — our real statement comes next week; from next week our voice will be much louder," he added. "I'm not trying to fight China. I just want to save my brother, a man who has been wrongfully imprisoned for 181 days. What I want to fight is injustice."

Earlier this year, David's whole family had planned to move to Shanghai and live with Laurent. "Now? Forget all of it. All we have left is fear and despair."

Chen Qirui, former Farine baker

Chen Qirui is 28 and has worked in baking for eight years. Earlier, when he was a baker in Hangzhou, he had heard that people came from out of town to Shanghai just to buy bread from a place called Farine. "Back then Farine was the benchmark in the industry — the one to look up to."

He had tried his hand at Japanese- and Taiwanese-style bread. In August 2016 he decided to join Farine, because "I wanted to know what French bread was really like. I wanted to make people the best bread I could."

The work was harder than he'd expected. Sometimes a shift began at midnight or 3 a.m. Farine provided neither meals nor housing. His monthly pay was 4,000 yuan; his rent in Minhang was 1,200. Some months Chen Qirui actually came out behind. But he was full of drive.

On March 22, Chen Qirui happened to have the day off. From colleagues he heard only that there had been a raid and a seizure; he did not realize that day had all but ended his career as a baker. The next day he even got a mass email from a company director: "There's no problem with this batch of flour. Don't worry, everyone — you'll be looked after."

But no one looked after anyone. After a week with no work and no income, and with the next round of rent due, he finally decided to go home to Jiangsu.

After he left Shanghai, Farine's HR department told all employees to come to 888 Huashan Road to sign separation agreements, promising that March wages would be paid in arrears. By then Chen Qirui was in Jiangsu; he signed the documents and mailed them back to Shanghai — and then heard nothing. "After I signed the separation agreement, there was no more news at all. HR vanished. Everyone dispersed. Apart from the other employees, you couldn't reach a single person. There was no one left to turn to."

Farine's hundred-plus employees set up a WeChat group to keep one another posted on the case. Over the past six months these people became fixtures at the public security bureau and the labor bureau, but the matter only ever seemed to spin in place. "The relevant department told us to go to Xuhui. Xuhui said it wasn't their jurisdiction and sent us to Huangpu. Huangpu said it wasn't theirs and sent us to Minhang. Minhang sent us back to Xuhui. Round and round it went. Everyone is worn out and has no idea what to do."

To this day the employees have not received a single yuan, but things finally moved in September: on the 14th and the 21st, two batches of employees separately applied for labor arbitration and at last got a clear answer — if anything is left after the company's fines are paid, wages will be issued; if nothing is left, they won't. That can hardly be called good news, but it still beats six months of dead silence.

Looking back now, Chen Qirui feels he walked straight into a trap. At least when he first joined in August of last year, he was sure the flour was not expired. Later he was moved to the semi-finished-goods department and kept completely in the dark. "The company hid things from its staff. It scrubbed the dates off things — whether something was new or a replacement, no one could tell. People did it because they trusted the boss. The boss deceived everyone. All of us were deceived."

In Chen Qirui's eyes, the people now in the detention center are all scapegoats, colleagues he knew well. "We parted without even saying goodbye." And "the ones who actually called the shots are all on the outside. The ones inside are ordinary employees with no real power." One employee was released after falling ill again and again in custody and being taken to the hospital several times.

He still has not told his parents the real reason he came back to Jiangsu. He just said the Shanghai factory was being renovated — though "the truth is, nobody wants you anymore."

He is not alone: more than a few of Farine's former employees share Chen Qirui's experience. The WeChat group of more than 100 people, once used for case updates, has also become a place to trade job leads.

Camille, former Farine marketing director

The time Camille has lived in Shanghai is almost exactly the time she spent working for Farine. She joined in 2014 and rose from marketing manager to marketing director — and along the way she turned a brand no one had heard of into a "viral" bakery everyone knew.

No one understood the brutal competition of Shanghai's restaurant business better than she did. This was not a market you could bluff. In her years in Shanghai she had grown used to watching new concepts launch and other new concepts get cast aside, month after month.

The customers here were too exacting. "Shanghainese and expats have both traveled widely. They can tell a quality product from a merely average one," Camille said. The logic of "middling quality at a steep price," she believed, simply did not work in Shanghai.

From the start, Farine had aimed for the best product in the business. Camille said the flour they imported was stone-ground from organic grain — "very high quality, chosen from the most expensive ingredients." She had sat through several routine inspections by the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration, covering all the certifications, hygiene, and spot quality checks. Just before the central kitchen opened, the company had been planning to bring in even stricter rules. And it was at exactly that moment that everything came apart.

On Monday, March 20 — the day the informant reported the expired flour to the food and drug regulator — Camille remembers the whole company falling into panic. Owner Franck cooperated with the regulator's on-site investigation. The next day, the informant posted on Weibo and uploaded three videos. Four Farine stores closed one after another. More than 100 people lost their jobs that day. On Wednesday, eight of Camille's colleagues were arrested, and Farine pulled off Dianping.

The week after it happened was a week Camille could not sleep. She and her colleagues took a relentless barrage of furious accusations from customers — and from people who had never even been customers.

Overnight, those words tore at her old values like wild animals. She did not even know whether the accusations were true. But one thing she was certain of: "In our five years of operation, not a single customer got food poisoning."

She suspected the whole thing was a setup. The informant had been with the company for only three months, yet had amassed a large body of evidence in that short time — which in itself looked suspicious. Camille and her colleagues widely believed he had probably been hired by someone to claim the government's 300,000-yuan whistleblower reward.

Camille still remembers that at the company's New Year party in late February, the informant had given a performance and chatted warmly with the others. "Imagine: for three months he befriended the staff, drank and danced and sang with everyone at the party — all of it to destroy our company. How terrifying."

What worries Camille most now are the colleagues still in prison. They are cut off from the world, not allowed to phone family and not allowed visits from friends or colleagues. The harshness of it has led Camille and her fellow French nationals to look hard, and anew, at this country's legal system.

"We can't understand why the response has been so violent. If someone had fallen ill or ended up in the hospital, the French would understand the government was worried about its people. But the four people in prison right now haven't harmed anyone. At the very least they could be released on bail pending investigation. Out on bail, they wouldn't put the Chinese public in any danger. They're not murderers or drug traffickers. They're obedient employees. And they're scared too."

Camille is in France now. She has heard that Laurent Fortin's mother, already retired, has had to go back to work to keep up with her son's monthly mortgage payments. "His mother hopes that the day her son gets out, he won't find himself with nowhere to live."

Xiao Jing, former Farine baker / informant and Weibo whistleblower

Xiao Jing is a Shenyang native with a thick regional accent. Before he turned 30 he had spent eight years working in Japan; back in China, he studied for a year at a Western pastry-and-baking school in Suzhou. That was when he set his sights on Farine in Shanghai, because "a single shop pulling in more than 90,000 yuan a day — how many shops like that are there in all of Shanghai, in all of China?"

Farine set an especially high bar for its bakers: beyond an interview and a day's trial shift, you needed prior work experience, and no apprentices were taken under any circumstances. Xiao Jing met every requirement, and in October he formally joined Farine.

By his account, within just a month he had heard from veteran colleagues that the flour was expired. But he waited until January of the next year to raise it with the Chinese manager on the shop floor — and was told: "Don't talk about this. Talking will cost you your job." The manager also offered a cautionary tale: not long before, staff in the dessert department had raised the same point about expired flour, after which owner Franck convened a meeting overnight and had management seal it off, and the people involved in the dessert department then left the company one by one.

That was his last exchange with management. From there he spent more than three months gathering evidence, until March 20, the day he chose to file a report with the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration. The Shanghai Food Safety Regulations took effect that same day.

Many people questioned whether the timing of the report was too neat — as if coordinated with the food and drug regulator. His answer: "I read the news too, right? I was thinking about the timing myself, wasn't I?"

He had reckoned that filing on the day of what was being billed as the "strictest food safety regulations in history" would yield the most effect for the least effort.

But filing that day was not enough. The following evening he followed up on Weibo with a post and three videos. The post that set off the whole affair read: "On March 20, 2017, I already reported this matter to the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration... For reasons unknown to me, Farine is still operating normally." It drew more than a million likes and shares in short order, and directly forced Farine's stores to close.

By exposing himself on social media, Xiao Jing also made himself a target.

After the post, he came under personal attacks online from former colleagues and strangers alike. The most-shared post on Zhihu claimed he had done it only after failing to wrest a stake in the company from Franck. Hemmed in by attacks and suspicion, Xiao Jing says he at one point sought psychological counseling.

Xiao Jing had opened a Pandora's box, but what came next was out of his hands.

In the months that followed, he went twice to assist the food and drug regulator's investigation, gave three recorded statements at the public security bureau over the course of the summer, and also spoke with discipline-inspection officials, who were looking into whether the FDA had abused its position. As he recalls it, the regulator's staff would usually get a tip-off before a spot check — a reminder to put on gloves the next day and swap in the good products. He never once saw the regulator go into the kitchen's back-of-house to inspect; they would usually just glance around the shop floor, take away finished products, and go test them. "Either way, they never found a single problem."

After helping with every government investigation, Xiao Jing did not get the reward he felt he deserved. On March 23, the day a press conference was held on the Farine case, Xiao Jing waited in a meeting room backstage. When it was over, Shanghai FDA director Yan Zuqiang promised him: "Shanghai will reward you handsomely, no question." Chasing that promise, he visited the FDA more times that summer than he could count — to no result. "Now he ignores me. He just won't deal with me at all."

With no reward money and no other source of income, Xiao Jing applied to no fewer than five bakeries in Shanghai between March and July. Every one turned him down. The circle is small, and Farine's 100-plus departing employees had since scattered to other bakeries across the city. The label of "the guy who reported them" hung over him like a dark cloud. So he kept showing up at the FDA's offices. "I'm from out of town, living in Shanghai with no job, and the financial pressure is huge, right? I asked whether they could help me out at all — even just have the FDA find me a halfway decent job. But they didn't," he said. "No reward from the FDA, not even a word of concern."

Looking back on that stretch, Xiao Jing said: "What's the most terrifying thing? Having no hope. No hope of getting by." In July he decided to leave Shanghai. On his way out he wrote on Weibo: "I'm a little afraid to go back to Shanghai. Afraid of sinking back into that gut-wrenching pain."

He has kept the truth about Farine from his parents all along — in fact, our interview was broken off several times by his mother walking in. He still has not found his next job as a baker.

And, of course, he is not in that WeChat group of more than 100 Farine employees.

Franck Pecol, owner of Farine

"This whole affair has sounded an alarm for French people doing business in China. You have to remember: anything can happen, and you never know how they'll enforce a new regulation," said French reporter Simon Leplâtre.

But Franck Pecol probably did not need the reminder. This Frenchman from Marseille had long been used to a wandering life: at 18 he left home to work as an apprentice and waiter in Paris, London, and the United States.

Franck came to Shanghai in 2004. His name was familiar in the French community in Shanghai and across China, because in just a few years he had built a small "Franck empire" in the city. In 2007 his first Shanghai restaurant, Franck Bistrot, opened at 376 Wukang Road. Over the years that followed he launched six food-and-beverage brands one after another: Rachel's, Franck Bistrot, Farine, Grains, WIYF, and Le Petit Franck.

"Franck used to love Shanghai. He truly believed it was one of the best places in the world to open a restaurant," Camille recalled.

In 2012, unable to find authentic French bread at his own Franck Bistrot, Franck opened the first Farine bakery next door. Camille remembers Franck often telling her that the French carry a certain arrogance and sense of superiority — they simply assume their products are better. But the reality was that many Chinese people had already been to France, some had even studied there, and they knew exactly what a good croissant and a baguette should taste like. So Franck set himself a rule: "Open a restaurant in Shanghai the way you'd open one in Paris." No cutting corners.

Franck knew Chinese consumers inside out. "I'm not too worried about marketing. Chinese people love to show off the food they eat and the way they live," Franck told QDaily in an interview late last year.

In five years Franck opened four Farine locations. In that same interview last year, he said he planned not only to keep expanding in Shanghai but to spread to nearby cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Nanjing.

Part of Franck's success came from being an exacting perfectionist. His standards for quality were extraordinarily high. We interviewed an employee who had worked at two of Franck's establishments, and she noted that "Franck came around to check on things basically every day. If he saw anything off, he'd say so on the spot — if he saw the straws on the counter were half gone, he'd say, 'keep an eye on that.'"

His staff were under enormous pressure at all hours to be the best, and his strictness went so far that "if you worked with him for more than six months, you'd pretty much get fired" — that was how Camille, who had worked with Franck for five years, described her former boss. His obsessive eye for product detail had become an invisible calling card in the trade.

Which is why, to this day, Camille and her colleagues still cannot understand how Franck could have let the expired-flour situation happen. "He was too sure of himself — sure enough to ignore Chinese law and use expired flour," she said. "I'd guess it will be the biggest mistake of his life."

Laurent's Chinese lawyer, Ma Hongtao, told French media that the French notion of "best before" does not mean a product expires on the labeled date. But, he said, "under Chinese law there is no official definition of 'best before' — only a 'quality guarantee period.'" The article quoted Ma Hongtao as saying: "If someone uses a product past its quality guarantee period, it is treated as a violation of Article 140 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China."

But none of that explains away how Franck Pecol "made himself scarce" once the case broke.

Chen Qirui's image of Franck as a boss worth respecting collapsed completely. "When it happened, he just took off. He left everyone hanging. People still believed in him, waiting for him to come back and sort it out. But nothing came."

What baffles Chen Qirui even more is that Franck's main partner, central-kitchen plant manager Marion Cambronnet, was released yet also declined to step forward and fix things, choosing the same vanishing act. "She's right here in China. She's a principal in this. She knows everything that happened. She could have settled it cleanly. But she hasn't taken a single step, made a single move."

Camille, now in France, hopes Franck will return to China soon and take responsibility. She sees Franck as the true author of it all, because it was his management that wrecked his employees' hard work in a stroke. "Inside the company, he made every decision for everyone. His management style was rule by intimidation — threatening staff with the sack, firing people on the most arbitrary grounds. He thought he could do anything, even break the law."

"We really hope he comes back to China and faces the Chinese legal process, instead of fleeing to France and making eight colleagues pay for what he did."

As of publication, the reporter had reached out to Franck on WeChat and received no reply. Franck's WeChat name had been pared down to a single "F," with an all-black profile photo.

Cover image: cityweekend, intramuros, delicieuxpate

At the interview subjects' request, Chen Qirui, Xiao Jing, and Camille are pseudonyms.