Vietnam: for young entrepreneurs, open a café to emancipate themselves – 06/10/2024 at 05:55

“At the beginning, my family wasn’t very supportive of me”: in Vietnam, a new generation of entrepreneurs are reinventing the standards of success at work, going against their parents, with espressos and egg coffee.

For a long time, Vu Dinh Tu hid from his parents that he ran a café. When they found out, they tried to convince him to return to his job at an investment bank, considered better paying and more stable.

“They saw the difficult work involved in running a business, from finances to personnel, and they didn’t want me to struggle,” explains the 32-year-old.

“I want to make people understand that this is a serious career,” he says.

His business now has four branches in Hanoi, the capital of a country fond of “cà phê”, where it is not uncommon to come across locals sipping their drink in the street on plastic stools.

In Vietnam, coffee can be drunk using original recipes that would make an Italian spit out their strong espresso: with condensed milk, whipped egg yolks, ice cubes, yogurt or even, sometimes, salt.

A new wave of entrepreneurs is modernizing the sector, in a context of economic development and openness to the world.

– Robusta producer –

Their first obstacle: defying the opinion of their parents, who grew up with the idea that success came through medicine or law.

“Cafes became a way to break the norms linked to family pressure to (…) work in something familiar and financially stable,” explains Sarah Grant, associate professor at California State University.

“They have also become spaces of possibility where creative people can come together in community,” she continues.

The love affair with coffee is inseparable from the production of the beans, initiated by French settlers in the 1850s.

Vietnam is the second largest producer of coffee in the world, with 17% of quantities of all varieties combined, behind Brazil, with cultivation concentrated in the Northern Highlands and mountains.

Robusta, with a taste considered less subtle than Arabica, represents the vast majority of volumes.

In new generation cafes, the menu offers a variety of beans roasted in different ways, in elaborate settings, conducive to socializing and… social networks.

– Expanding market –

“When you make coffee, it’s almost like you’re an artist,” says Nguyen Thi Hue, a 29-year-old former journalist who has set up her shop in a picturesque alley in Hanoi.

The cafe industry is worth 400 million dollars (360 million EUR) and is growing at 8% per year, noted the brand consultancy firm Mibrand.

But the figure could be underestimated, due to thousands of businesses operating illegally, estimates Vu Thi Kim Oanh, a teacher on a Vietnamese campus of the Australian university of RMIT.

The demand can attract people looking for a new professional horizon, with a little money to get started. “If it works, you move on. If it doesn’t work, you move on,” she continues.

For the moment, it’s working, to the point of resisting foreign multinationals, attracted by the prospects that the country offers to its hundred million inhabitants.

The star of international chains, Starbucks, will represent only 2% of the market in 2022, according to Euromonitor International. The American brand opened its 100th store last year in Vietnam, in ten years of presence, while it has five times more in Thailand, although it is less populated.