Vietnam’s Young Coffee Entrepreneurs Brew Up A Revolution – CoffeeTalk
Vietnam’s coffee industry has become a hub for young entrepreneurs, challenging family expectations around work and promoting creativity and self-expression. Coffee, traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk or even egg, has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture. However, many ambitious middle-class parents in Vietnam would not choose to start a cafe for their children. Vu Dinh Tu, a 32-year-old finance graduate, opened four branches of Refined over four years in Hanoi, which are packed from morning till night with coffee lovers enjoying Vietnamese robusta beans in surroundings more like a cocktail bar than a cafe.
Coffee first arrived in Vietnam in the 1850s during French colonial rule, but a shift in the 1990s and early 2000s to large-scale production of robusta made the country a coffee production powerhouse and the world’s second largest exporter. A passion for the coffee business is often linked to that history, and coffee entrepreneurs are “really proud that Vietnam is this coffee-producing country and has a lot of power in the global market.”
29-year-old Nguyen Thi Hue is mixing a lychee matcha cold brew in her new glass-fronted shop, a one-woman “Slow Bar” coffee business. She says that making coffee is almost like being an artist, and there is money to be made if a cafe appeals to selfie-loving Generation Z. No-one dresses poorly to go to a cafe, and the cafe’s style is what counts for her more than the brews.
Vietnam’s coffee shop industry is worth $400 million and is growing up to eight percent a year, according to branding consultancy Mibrand. There are thousands of shops not officially registered with authorities, and if it goes well, then you continue. Starbucks accounted for just two percent of the market in 2022, and earlier this year it announced it would shut down its only store in Ho Chi Minh City selling speciality brews.
For Tu, his parents eventually came around, and he plans further shops, wanting to create a workforce that loves coffee as much as he does. He wants to build the mindset that this is a serious career.
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Source: Coffee Talk