When was coffee first introduced into Vietnam?

In the 19th century, coffee was first introduced and familiarized to Vietnam by the French under colonization. Currently, Vietnam is the second largest coffee exporters of the world, accounting for approximately sixteen percent of the world’s total coffee production. Furthermore, Vietnam is also the producer leading in the volumes of robusta exported to many countries all over the world.

Vietnamse coffee – a fast development in a short time period.

During a long period of time, the popular of Vietnam coffee is as strong evidence showing that Vietnam coffee has had a firm position in the world’s coffee consumption. Vietnam coffee is available in most of the nations throughout the world including key importers such as Germany, the United States of America, Spain, Italy, Russia and so on. In addition, the export volumes of Vietnamese coffee to these markets tend to increase year on year. This trend has contributed to create available job opportunities for both local farmers and manufacturers and transform Vietnamese economy. More specificly, coffee industry as a whole creates more than 2.6 million jobs worldwide, improves and enhances living standard of local farmers in developing countries; consequently, the percentage of Vietnamese now lived under the poverty was reduced as low as 10 percent recently as compared to 60 percent by 1994.

Vietnam coffee production as compared to other producers.

Vietnam coffee is still very potential if coffee quality is improved.

Although Vietnamese coffee production has expanded for years, the value of coffee products is still low. According to a report of Vietnam Trade Promotion Department, “Vietnamese coffee has relatively low quality due to bad processing and drying equipment and obsolete harvesting technology”. As a result, the next step of Vietnam coffee should be to focus on advanced processing, increasing quality and productivity within each cultivation area. For a sustainable development, the coffee industry must be taken cared by the government.

On 1st August 2014, the minister of Vietnamese agriculture and rural development department signed the 3417/QĐ-BNN-TT decision to conduct the project named “Developing coffee industry sustainably until 2020.” The goal of this project is to keep existing coffee crop areas remain stable with 600,000 hectare, achieve 1.6 million tons per year in total, 3.8 to 4.2 billion USD in turnover per year. By this way, Vietnam coffee is committed to not only achieving in quantity but also in quality.

Local Vietnamese coffee brands.

Excepting the policies of the government, many business men are ambitious to boost the brand of Vietnam coffee into a higher standard.

One of them is Vu, the founder of Trung Nguyen coffee which is one of market leaders in Vietnamese coffee market. Trung Nguyen can be considered as a success case study for Vietnamese coffee. There are around thousands of local coffee brands in Vietnam which are covering every part of the nation. For sure, local coffee lovers will have more choice for drinking coffees. However, coffee quality is a main concern of local coffee lovers now. As there are many local coffee roasters just offer fake coffee powder which is, in deed, made from burnt soya beans mixed with caramel and artificial coffee flavor. Those coffees are very cheap at around $1.5 per kilogram and will ruin the reputation of Vietnamese coffee again. This is not an easy feeling as you must drink fake coffees when you are staying in the world’s second largest coffee producer. It is just simply unbelievable.

In conclusion, Vietnam produces both types of coffee including arabica and robusta. But the production of robusta is much bigger with 1.5 to 1.7 million tons per annum while arabica is just accounting for sixty thousand tons. Vietnam is a new player of world’s coffee industry but it soon left its impression to the other producing coutries. It needs only a short time period to be ranked as world’s second but the quality still needs to be improved. There are many local coffee roasters in Vietnam and many of them are producing fake coffee powder made from burnt soyabeans.