On a Caffeine High
Vietnamese coffee evangelist Dang Le Nguyen Vu talks about bringing the brew to the next level.
By Geoffrey Eu Trung Nguyen Café
Liang Court #02-34
Tel: 6837-3314
www.trungnguyen.sg“Coffee doesn’t have borders, it’s for the whole world, and our philosophy is for serving the whole world.” Dang Le Nguyen Vu – Chairman of Trung Nguyen
DEEP in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Dak Lak Province about 90 kilometers north of the hill resort of Dalat, the little-known provincial capital of Buon Ma Thuot is the gateway to a region replete with waterfalls, wild elephants and ethnic minorities. What’s more, it’s where some of the best coffee in the world is grown, and if dang Le Nguyen Vu has his way, it wll also be home to a Global Coffee Sanctuary, his concept of a place where coffee reigns supreme.
Mr Vu, also known in his country as Ong Vua caphe – King of Coffee – is the chairman of Trung Nguyen, the leading coffee producer in Vietnam, accounting for about 60 percent of the one million tons produced annually and the country’s leading exporter of coffee. Vietnam, with a history of coffee cultivation dating back to 18th century, is now the second-largest producer in the world, after Brazil.
Mr. Vu, who left medical school in the mid-1990s and turned Trung Nguyen from a small coffee processing company into a premium brand name with over 50,000 point-of-sales outlets and some 1,000 retail establishments in the country, was in Singapore this week for the opening of a flagship café in Liang Court.
But, filled with a confidence that comes from success, a passion for spreading the word about coffee and armed with an ambitious – some may say outlandish-vision, he has a lot more than Starbucks in his sights.
“We want to promote coffee as fuel for the knowledge economy, just like oil is fuel for the industrial economy,” he says through an interpreter. “Two billion people drink coffee every day, and most consider it to be just a normal drink, but coffee is not a normal drink. Just as tea drinking is an art, a philosophy, we believe we can bring coffee to the next level.” With his concept, which involves building a physical space for people to indulge in what he calls “coffee fellowship”, Mr. Vu makes no real distinction between drinking coffee the Vietnamese way – drip style and either black or with milk and sugar and other coffee-drinking nations. “Coffee doesn’t have borders, it’s for the whole world, and our philosophy is for serving the whole world,” he says.
“Coffee is energy for the brain, it feeds creativity. We make the most specialist coffee in the world and through coffee, we want to create a sustainable development.” He adds, “we want to create an impression where Buon Ma Thuot in the central highlands of Vietnam is the home base for that philosophy.” Mr. Vu enlisted the help of various specialists to come up with a master plan for his coffee sanctuary, including Singapore architect Tay Kheng Soon. The long-term plan involves turning a 2,000- hectare site next to Buon Ma Thuot into an integrated coffee city. Next month, the first component in the plan – a coffee cultural village – is set to open. The next phase, now under construction, will be a 46-hectare coffee zone, a community with all the elements of a sustainable development, including eco-tourism, schools, plantations and housing for 16,000 people.
Trung Nguyen has committed US$200 million for this and Mr. Vu says the project is also getting support from the government and also generating interest from potential international partners and global brands.
Trung Nguyen presents its specialty roasts in a creative way at its new Singapore café, offering several premium blends, all of which are served it the traditional Vietnamese style. Prices range from $3.20 for a cup of Vietnamese Robusta to $10.90 for a top-of-the-line cup brewed from beans foraged by wild weasels, “resulting in the ultimate flavours of rich, dark chocolate paired with earthy flavours”.
Mr. Vu says the conditions for growing coffee in the Dak Lak region – fertile volcanic soil, favourable climate at an altitude of about 600 metres and growers who have a rich tradition of coffee farming-make for an ideal environment. He is convinced that his view of coffee as the new opiate of the masses is viable. “The world is facing crises-global warning, climate change, economic meltdown – we need a new model for sustainable development,” he says. “We have to create a haven for coffee fellowship.”
Putting a new spin on coffee as sustenance for the intellect may be one way of looking at it, but Mr. Vu is more concerned about improving mankind, not marketing. In fact, he says quite candidly that he does not expect to recoup the cost for his coffee sanctuary and its related programmes-instead, he hopes to reap benefits of a different kind.
“ I put my passion into it, and also the way we approach business is creative,” says Mr. Vu, who hopes to reserve his company’s current ratio of 70 percent domestic consumption to 30 percent exports in the near. “The coffee market was already big in Vietnam when I stated in 1996, but the potential is even bigger,” he says.
“The main idea is to create a new model for sustainable development, based on coffee,” he says, adding that Columbia University in New York has already used him as a case study in the business of entrepreneurship. “When you create this kind of model, it benefits Vietnam-and the whole world as well.”
btnews@sph.com.sg
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