One of my Vietnamese friends is working for the Brussels branch of the World Bank. A techie, he is as eloquent about coffee as a coffee expert is. Once he carried 10 kilograms of coffee beans to Brussels intending to make Vietnamese coffee more known there. A few days later, my friend came back to the place where he had entrusted the coffee to see whether somebody showed interest in his “Made in Vietnam” coffee. There it was, he was shown where it was: the bag was near the garbage bin. He was told that Vietnamese was leading the world in coffee production, but they still didn’t know how to process the coffee.
My friend said most Europeans require standards for their food. They buy coffee and process it into specific flavor—sour, bitter and both sour and bitter at the same time. Customers are kings whose every taste must be met.
Many European supermarkets sell Vietnamese coffee that is in the form of instant coffee with a lot of sugar. The truth is, however, Europeans are afraid of sugar. What’s more, they don’t know where this kind of coffee originates from. If you cannot sell your coffee well, don’t blame others for the failure. As my friend didn’t understand that truth, his bag of 10 kilograms of fresh coffee beans should be a bitter lesson to learn.
My friend also told the story of his old aunt, a coffee trader who knew thoroughly what the best coffee beans are. She might trade tens of tons of coffee at a time. Yet during her spare time, she still hand-picked the best beans with a pen which she would sell them to her coffee connoisseurs.
Later, she bought a screening machine which selected beans using laser light. The machine was able to categorize coffee beans into high, medium and low quality. The premium coffee was carefully processed and some might be sent to Europe. The lowest one was sold to sidewalk coffee shops.
It has been more than a century since coffee was first introduced to Vietnam by the French. Yet Vietnamese coffee has yet to build its own coffee brand on the international market. It is partly due to Vietnamese’s complacence about their own coffee.
While many Vietnamese have taken time to try to find out the “true meaning” of their coffee, people in African Ethiopia are growing, tending, harvesting and processing coffee beans in accordance with French standards that have prevailed on the international market.
It is hoped that Vietnamese coffee will successfully build its prestige in European markets propelled forward by EVFTA. This is possible if the mindset that there are hard-to-please customers will be gone. Instead, there exist only kings who are customers insisting on the standards for the products they buy.
That is possible only when Vietnamese coffee conforms to European norms, and local companies and people no longer easily accept a fruit seller who brushes some kind of unknown chemical to her goods. Then, EVFTA will become really a golden opportunity for Vietnamese.
