Specialty Coffee in Vietnam: From Commodity to Cup

The commodity problem

For thirty years Vietnamese robusta was a commodity. Buyers wanted volume and a consistent grade, priced against the London exchange, and they did not pay more for coffee that tasted better.

Every practice that specialty coffee criticises follows logically from that. Strip-picking (stripping the whole branch, ripe and green cherries together) is much faster than selective picking. Drying on a tarpaulin costs nothing. Blending everything into one grade is simpler than keeping lots separate.

A farmer doing all three was responding to what the market paid for. What changed is that somebody started paying for something else.

What has changed

A scale that fits the bean. The Coffee Quality Institute’s Fine Robusta protocol scores canephora on its own terms, which gives a producer something to aim at and a buyer something to pay for. How that protocol works, and what it has changed on farms, is covered on the robusta page.

Domestic demand. Vietnam now drinks roughly 5 million 60 kg bags a year, and a growing share of that is in cafés willing to pay well above commodity for good Vietnamese beans. This matters more than export specialty, because it is a market a small producer can reach.

Processing as differentiation. A producer at 600 m cannot compete with Colombia on altitude. They can compete on processing (honey, anaerobic, careful natural), and that is where much of the effort in Đắk Nông and Đắk Lắk has gone.

Regulation. The EU Deforestation Regulation requires traceability to plot level for coffee entering the European market. It is a compliance burden, and it also means knowing which farm a bag came from, which is exactly the record a specialty buyer wants.

What has not

Scale. Fine robusta and Vietnamese arabica together are a small fraction of the crop. The overwhelming majority of Vietnamese coffee is still commodity robusta, and will be for a long time.

The ceiling. Robusta contains roughly half arabica’s sucrose and substantially less lipid. Careful processing closes much of the gap between bad robusta and good robusta. It does not close the gap between good robusta and good arabica, and claims that it does should be treated sceptically.

Replanting. Around 30% of Vietnam’s coffee area is 20 years or older. Ageing trees yield less and are more disease-prone, and replanting takes land out of production for years. This is a bigger constraint on Vietnamese coffee’s future than processing technique.

How to tell the difference when buying

A bag of specialty Vietnamese coffee will usually tell you most of the following:

• Where: a province at minimum, ideally a district, commune or farm
• What: robusta, arabica, or a named arabica variety
• How: natural, washed, honey, anaerobic
• How high: an altitude figure
• When: a roast date rather than a best-before date

A bag that says “Vietnamese coffee, dark roast, 100% pure” is telling you that nobody kept the lot separate. It might still be perfectly good coffee for cà phê sữa đá, and cheaper. It is a different product.

Cà phê chồn, sold in English as weasel coffee, is the label none of this reaches. The claim it makes is about an animal, and no bag carries evidence for it.

What to make of it

Vietnamese specialty coffee is real and small. The distance between carelessly produced robusta and carefully produced robusta is very large, probably larger than most buyers assume, and that is where most of the recent progress sits. The distance between the best robusta and the best arabica is also real, and it is not closing.

For a buyer, the label says more than the species does. A traceable, carefully processed robusta and an anonymous “100% arabica” are very different products, and the species name alone will not tell you which is better.