How Did Vietnamese Coffee Take Over the World?
There is a good chance you drank Vietnamese coffee this week without realising it. Not in a trendy cafe,
You have probably drunk Vietnamese coffee this week without knowing it. Here is how a country that was barely on the coffee map forty years ago became the engine room of the world’s coffee, and the one battle it still has to win.
There is a good chance you drank Vietnamese coffee this week without realising it. Not in a trendy cafe, but in a jar of instant, or in the espresso blend at your local coffee shop. Vietnam is now the second biggest coffee producer on earth, and by far the biggest grower of one particular bean. Its coffee is hiding in millions of cups all over the world, usually without a label.
That is a strange thing for a country that was barely on the coffee map forty years ago. So how did Vietnam go from almost nowhere to feeding the world’s coffee habit? It comes down to history, timing, and a business that is still only half built.
From one tree to number two
Coffee is not even native to Vietnam. It was brought over by French missionaries in 1857, starting with a single tree, and for a long time it stayed small. As recently as 1986, the whole country grew coffee on only about 50,000 hectares and produced a tiny amount by today’s standards.
That changed in 1986, when Vietnam launched a set of economic reforms known as Doi Moi, which opened the country up to private business and the free market. The government, with a push from the World Bank, decided coffee would be a major export crop. Farmers were given land in the Central Highlands, the cool, high region with rich volcanic soil that turned out to be ideal for growing coffee, and millions of people moved there to plant it.
What followed was one of the fastest farming booms anywhere. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, the area planted with coffee grew by around a fifth every single year. By the early 2000s, Vietnam had gone from a minor player to the second biggest coffee producer in the world, behind only Brazil. It has stayed there ever since.
The robusta powerhouse
The key to all of it is the type of bean. There are two that matter. Arabica is the smoother, more expensive one that specialty cafes love. Robusta is the stronger, more bitter, higher-caffeine one, and it is cheaper to grow. Vietnam bet almost everything on robusta, and today around 95 in every 100 beans it grows are robusta. It produces roughly 40 per cent of all the robusta on the planet.
Robusta might not sound glamorous, but it is the workhorse of the coffee world. It is the backbone of instant coffee, and it is blended into a huge amount of the espresso served across Europe and beyond, because it gives a strong kick and a thick crema for less money. When you buy a cheap jar of instant or a two-shot flat white, there is a very good chance Vietnamese robusta is in it.
That quiet role turned into a goldmine recently. Bad weather and poor harvests in Brazil and elsewhere sent coffee prices to their highest levels in decades, and roasters started swapping expensive arabica for cheaper robusta wherever they could. Vietnam, sitting on most of the world’s robusta, cashed in. In 2025 its coffee exports were worth close to 9 billion dollars, a record, up from about 5.5 billion the year before. For a while, robusta was in such demand that it cost almost as much as arabica, which had hardly ever happened before.
The catch: selling beans, not brands
But there is a catch, and it is the one that frustrates Vietnamese coffee bosses most. For all that success, Vietnam mostly sells cheap raw beans, not finished products. Around 87 per cent of what it exports is green, unroasted beans, sold by the tonne to giant foreign buyers. Only a small slice is turned into the higher-value stuff like instant coffee or roasted, branded packs.
That matters, because the real money in coffee is in the brand, not the bean. Think about who actually profits from your morning cup. Most of it goes to Nestlé, whose Nescafé is built partly on Vietnamese robusta, and to the big roasters and coffee shop chains. The farmer in the Central Highlands who grew the bean gets a tiny fraction of what you pay at the counter. So Vietnam can be the second biggest coffee nation on earth and still be almost invisible on the shelf. Most people drinking its coffee have no idea where it came from.
The brands trying to go global
That is exactly what a wave of Vietnamese companies is now trying to fix, by selling not just beans but Vietnamese coffee culture itself.
The biggest name at home is Trung Nguyen, whose G7 instant coffee is everywhere and which is pushing its Legend cafes abroad, with ambitions of thousands of stores worldwide. Highlands Coffee, started in 1999 by a Vietnamese-American, has grown to hundreds of outlets and is now majority-owned by Jollibee, the Filipino fast-food giant, which gives it the money and the reach to expand across Asia. Smaller chains are testing the water too. Cong Caphe, with its retro communist-era styling and its famous coconut coffee, has opened stores in South Korea, Malaysia and Canada. Over in New York, a Vietnamese-American brand called Nguyen Coffee Supply has got its beans into Whole Foods and Target.
The secret weapon in all of this is the coffee itself, which is genuinely different. Vietnamese coffee is brewed through a little metal drip filter called a phin, and served in ways most Westerners have never seen: strong and sweet over ice with condensed milk, whipped up with egg yolk into something like a warm dessert, or blended with coconut. These drinks travel well because they are unusual and they look wonderful in a photo, which counts for a lot in the age of social media.
So did it take over the world?
So has Vietnamese coffee really taken over the world? Yes and no, and the difference between the two is the whole story.
On the supply side, it has completely conquered. Vietnam quietly became the backbone of the world’s coffee supply, the source that most instant coffee and a lot of espresso now depends on. If Vietnam stopped growing coffee tomorrow, prices everywhere would jump and plenty of familiar products would suddenly cost a lot more.
On the brand side, though, the takeover is only just beginning. The world drinks Vietnam’s beans but mostly does not know it, and turning that into recognised, profitable brands is the hard part that still lies ahead. Being in everyone’s cup is already a huge achievement. Getting the world to actually know whose coffee it is drinking would be worth far more, and that part is still up for grabs.
Sources
- World Coffee Research. Vietnam country profile (production, robusta share, farms). https://worldcoffeeresearch.org/countries/vietnam
- Wikipedia. Coffee production in Vietnam (history, French introduction in 1857, Doi Moi reforms). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Vietnam
- Vietnam Briefing (Dezan Shira & Associates). Vietnam’s coffee market: consumers, challenges and prospects. https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/vietnam-coffee-market-a-deep-dive-into-its-consumers-challenges-and-prospects.html
- USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. Coffee Annual: Vietnam, 2025 (production and export data). https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Coffee+Annual_Hanoi_Vietnam_VM2025-0018.pdf
