VietNamNet Bridge - Nguyen Tan Ky, general director of Vinacafe Bien Hoa, a big coffee producer in Vietnam, admitted that under market pressure, two product lines of Vinacafe had been mixed with soybeans.

At a meeting between businesses and consumers on August 23, a consumer asked Ky: “Recently your company advertised to sell only pure coffee as of August 1. It means that previously your firm sold mixed coffee?"

Ky admitted: "I would like to confess that 3-4 years ago, precisely in 2012, under the pressure of the market and the new taste of customers, we produced two soybean-coffee mixed products Wake-up and Phin."

Ky said once he and his family had a vacation on Phu Quoc Island, where he drank mixed coffee at a local café.

"I easily recognized that the coffee was not original and it was mixed with soybeans. When I sipped the coffee, the bitterness was still in my throat," he said.

After that he was tormented as his company had broken its 50-year business philosophy. "We decided to produce only pure coffee from August 1," Ky said.

Vietnam is a big coffee exporter in the world but it does not have official standards on coffee, he said.

Earlier, another coffee producing giant in Vietnam’s coffee industry - Nescafe - also admitted that its coffee products for the Vietnamese market contained soybeans. 

The reason cited was to "match the tastes of the Vietnamese people."

At a meeting, Nguyen Dinh Toan, from Masan Consumer, quoted a recent report as saying that 50% of coffee in Vietnam is not pure. He also said that the price for 1kg of coffee in Vietnam is about $2, while it is $20 in the US.

Nam Son