Vietnam

Why this origin matters

Vietnam grows more coffee than any country except Brazil, and nearly all of it is robusta: on the USDA's estimates for 2025/26, more than a third of the world's robusta came from this one country. It is the coffee in a great deal of instant coffee and of blends, which is why most people have drunk it without being told. What makes Vietnam unlike any other origin is how recent this is. In 1986 the country had about 50,000 hectares of coffee and was a marginal producer. By the end of the 1990s it was the second-largest in the world. The growers' association counts a nearly hundredfold increase in thirty years, and much of what is distinctive about Vietnamese coffee today, including its very high yields, its dependence on irrigation and the pressures on its land and water, follows from that speed.

Where coffee grows

Coffee is concentrated to an unusual degree. The Central Highlands, a plateau region in the south of the country that the growers' association describes as five relatively flat plateaus of basalt soil, held 92 per cent of Vietnam's coffee area and produced 90 per cent of its coffee, as the USDA's attaché reported in 2025. Five provinces make up the region: Đắk Lắk, Lâm Đồng, Đắk Nông, Gia Lai and Kon Tum. The rest is spread thinly: a south-eastern group in which the ministry's table names Bình Phước, Đồng Nai and Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu, a strip of the central coast, and the mountains of the north-west around Sơn La and Điện Biên. Robusta fills the plateaus. Arabica is grown where it is cooler, and the government has supported it in Sơn La in the north-west, in Nghệ An and Quảng Trị in the centre, and in Lâm Đồng.

The association's profile says, in a single sentence and without a source, that Vietnam's coffee is grown between 500 and 1,200 metres above sea level; nothing else read gives an altitude. The south has two seasons, wet and dry, and the coffee year is set by them: the rains end around the beginning of October, the harvest begins, and the crop is irrigated through the dry months that follow.

A coffee country built since 1986

In 1986 Vietnam began the economic reforms known as Đổi Mới, and in the same year, on the association's account, the government began concentrating resources on coffee and encouraging individual households to grow it alongside the state farms. A World Bank study of the sector in 2004 describes what happened as the meeting of two things nobody had planned together: an overwhelming response by farmers to that first stimulus, and unusually favourable world prices. It found that donor funding earmarked for coffee came to about five per cent of the cost of the expansion.

Ownership changed as fast as the area. Until the late 1980s the state owned and ran most coffee farms. By the early 1990s about half were in private hands, mostly as long leases to farmers, and by 2003 only about five per cent of the coffee area was still state-run. The association's later profile estimates that households farm about 85 per cent of the area, most of them on less than a hectare.

Output went from 18,400 tonnes in 1986 to 900,000 tonnes in 2000. The world price then collapsed, and the World Bank counted the damage: nearly 170 million dollars in outstanding loans to farmers in the main coffee-growing region, at least a quarter of them not being repaid, and a temporary government freeze on coffee growers' loans to prevent widespread default.

Who paid for the boom

The land was not empty. The first expansion around Đắk Lắk came with government-encouraged migration of ethnic Vietnamese into what were called New Economic Zones in the western highlands, and the World Bank study records that spontaneous migration into the region soon exceeded what had been planned and was already substantial by 1991. It states that in many cases both private farmers and new state enterprises took over communal lands of the ethnic minorities who lived there, that customary community tenure was not recognised in law until a later land law, and that land disputes followed.

The same study records forest cleared for new coffee, as part of a 38 per cent increase in Vietnam's cultivated area between 1990 and 2000. And it found the gains unevenly shared: in 2002 about 30 per cent of the country's coffee growers belonged to an ethnic minority, and they were more than half of its poor coffee growers. These are findings of one study, two decades old. CoffeeHQ has read nothing that measures where those households stand now.

Species and varieties

Robusta is about nineteen bags in every twenty. In the association's 2019 profile it covered 92.9 per cent of the coffee area and gave 97 per cent of the crop, and on the USDA's estimates for 2025/26 the proportion was much the same. The arabica is, on the same profile's figure, almost all Catimor, the rust-resistant group of lines descended from Caturra and the Timor Hybrid; the profile says researchers have released newer arabica varieties intended to replace it and improve quality. The robusta itself is not one thing. Since the early 1990s the research institute in Đắk Lắk has selected and released a series of high-yielding clones, named TR4 to TR15 and TRS1, and the profile names TR14, TR15 and TRS1 as the ones growers have taken up most.

Vietnamese robusta is not one plant

The association's profile says most robusta grown in Vietnam came by way of Java, where the first large robusta breeding programme was set up in the 1900s. A genomic study published in 2025 looked further back. It genotyped 126 robusta trees from the research institute's collection in Đắk Lắk, including historical accessions, elite clones and locally cultivated clones, and compared them with wild trees from across the species' African range.

Every Vietnamese tree it tested traced at least partly to the Congo Basin. The authors then chose a core set of 45 trees that holds most of the collection's diversity, for conservation and future breeding, and sequenced those in full. Fourteen of the 45 were of Congo Basin origin alone. The other 31 also carried ancestry from other wild groups, from the Guinean region, the central African Atlantic coast and the area of the eastern Central African Republic and Uganda, groups the authors note have been widely used in crossbreeding. The study is of the collection, not of farmers' fields, so it shows what diversity is available to Vietnamese breeders, not how much of it is planted.

The world's highest yields, and trees that are getting old

Vietnamese robusta yields far more per hectare than coffee does almost anywhere else; the association's profile calls the national average considerably higher than that of any other producing country, and the USDA's attaché estimates between 2.7 and 2.9 tonnes of green coffee per hectare in recent seasons. The yields come from selected clones, heavy fertilising and irrigation, and both sources say the same practices have a cost. The profile describes excessive inputs exhausting trees and polluting soil, with fungal disease and root nematodes following. The attaché reported in 2026 that high prices had led farmers to apply fertiliser beyond recommended levels.

The trees planted in the boom are also ageing together. The research institute told the attaché that about 30 per cent of the coffee area is twenty years old or more and needs replanting, and that it supplies four to five million seedlings a year for the purpose. Most of the farms that have to do it are smaller than a hectare. The attaché also reports more farmers growing coffee among durian, avocado, macadamia or pepper, which spreads their risk and makes the coffee area harder to count.

Harvest

The coffee season opens on 1 October, as the rains end in the south, and Vietnam's marketing year is counted from that month. Cherries are mostly picked by hand. The association's profile is frank that the normal method in the Central Highlands is stripping, taking ripe, unripe and overripe cherries from the branch together, and that this is one of the recognised reasons for the lower quality of Vietnamese coffee; selective picking of ripe cherries is the alternative. CoffeeHQ gives no month-by-month harvest calendar for Vietnam, because none of the documents read gives one.

A crop that has to be watered

The harvest opens as the dry season begins, and coffee in the Central Highlands is irrigated through it. Much of the water comes from wells. The association's profile describes traditional irrigation as still the main method in most growing areas and as the cause of severe groundwater loss, and says that in many localities the drilling of wells for coffee has damaged the groundwater it relies on. The government's sustainable-coffee plan of 2014 set out to cap the national coffee area at 600,000 hectares and to explore water-saving irrigation.

The cap did not hold. The ministry's own figure for the coffee area was about 730,000 hectares in 2026, as the USDA reports it. CoffeeHQ states no figure for how much water a coffee tree is given or how far the water table has fallen: the documents read describe the problem and do not measure it.

How the coffee is processed

The dry method is the usual one: the whole cherry is dried, in the sun or in a mechanical drier, and then hulled. The association's 2019 profile says nearly 80 per cent of post-harvest processing was by sunlight, and that farmers and traders in the Central Highlands were increasingly drying by machine instead, in batches of twelve to sixteen hours, burning dried coffee husk or coal. Larger producers mainly use the wet method.

Why the same species is sold at two very different qualities

The association's profile gives the reasons the bulk of the crop is commodity grade, and none of them is the species. Cherries are stripped at mixed ripeness. Most are dried in the open by households with different equipment and care. Farms are small, scattered and independent, so one lot is the work of many hands, and the profile says dry mills and proper storage are too few for quality to be certified.

It also reports the research institute's cupping of its newer material: robusta clones scoring 70 points or more, and some new arabica varieties above 80, on the Specialty Coffee Association's scale. Those are the institute's own results for selected plants, published as a chart without the underlying scores. The ministry's specialty coffee plan of 2021 is modest about the scale: 19,000 hectares by 2030, about three per cent of the coffee area.

How it is graded and sold

Vietnam sells most of its coffee as green beans and is trying to sell less of it that way. Most of what it exported in 2025/26 was green beans, and the rest roasted or soluble coffee, in the proportions charted below; the industry association puts processed coffee at about 13 per cent of exports and expects it to grow, and the USDA reports new instant-coffee and roasting plants being built by both foreign and Vietnamese companies. The same factories are why Vietnam also imports coffee, most of it from Laos, Indonesia, Brazil and Uganda. The European Union took 41 per cent of exports in the attaché's 2025 report, which makes the Union's deforestation regulation a practical matter for more than 600,000 smallholder households: the ministry and exporters are building farm-level traceability to meet it. About 40 per cent of the coffee area carried a sustainability certification in 2025, according to the attaché.

How coffee is drunk in Vietnam

Vietnam drinks a growing share of its own coffee. The USDA's attaché put domestic consumption at 4.9 million bags in 2025/26, up from 3.2 million four seasons earlier, and attributed the rise to a growing middle class, record tourism and a café trade that it counted at more than 500,000 coffee shops in 2025, from neighbourhood cafés to chains. About two thirds of what is drunk is roasted and ground coffee and about a third is soluble. The attaché also reports demand moving towards specialty arabica, better robusta and brewing at home. How the traditional cup is made, slowly through a small metal filter and often over sweetened condensed milk, is described in CoffeeHQ's entry on phin coffee, linked below.

Consumption figures are the USDA attaché's estimates in green-bean equivalent. The count of coffee shops is from the attaché's 2025 report and is not sourced further there.

Preparation traditions

How coffee is traditionally prepared and served in this country, in CoffeeHQ's international preparation atlas.

• Vietnamese phin coffee
• Vietnamese egg coffee (cà phê trứng)
• Vietnamese salt coffee (cà phê muối)

History

Coffee came with the French. The growers' association dates the first arabica to 1857, brought by missionaries and tried in the grounds of Catholic churches in the northern provinces; William Ukers, writing in 1922, dates the first experiments to 1887, near Hanoi, with arabica seed from Réunion. The two accounts are not reconciled here. They agree on what followed: arabica proved poorly suited, and hardier species were brought in, robusta and excelsa in 1908 on the association's account. Ukers, writing of French Indo-China as a whole, recorded about a million bearing trees in 1916 and exports averaging roughly half a million pounds a year in the five years to 1918, nearly all to France. Growth stayed slow through the wars. In 1986 there were about 50,000 hectares.

Pressures on the sector

• Drought in the dry season. The growers' association's profile records record heat and drought in 2013 and, in early 2016, what it calls the worst drought in twenty years, with rain from December 2015 to February 2016 at 40 per cent below the previous year's and reservoirs 15 to 35 per cent below average by mid-March. In 2026 the USDA's attaché reported rainfall below normal from January to March across the Central Highlands.
• Falling groundwater. Both the association and the attaché say irrigation is drawing the water table down: the profile describes wells drilled for coffee as destroying groundwater resources in many localities, and the attaché says early or excessive irrigation raises yield in the short term and depletes groundwater in the long term.
• Shrinking suitable land. The profile reports a projection by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture that rising temperatures and shifting rainfall may cost Vietnam half of its current robusta-growing area by 2050. That is a model's projection, reported here second-hand, not an observation.
• Water. Irrigation from wells is lowering the groundwater the crop depends on, in a region whose dry season the association's profile expects to become longer and hotter.
• Old trees on small farms. About 30 per cent of the area is due for replanting, and most of the farms that must do it are smaller than a hectare.
• Rising costs. Growers told the USDA's attaché in 2026 that fertiliser and fuel had risen by about 30 per cent and labour by 33 per cent in a year, while prices were falling from their 2024 to 2025 peak.
• Traceability. Meeting the European Union's deforestation rules means mapping the plots of more than 600,000 smallholders.

The 2050 projection is quoted from the association's profile and from a 2025 genomic study that cites the same work; CoffeeHQ has not read the projection itself.

Institutions worth knowing

• Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association (VICOFA) — the industry association, formed in 1990, which the International Coffee Organization's profile describes as closer to a government-affiliated body than an independent one
• Western Highlands Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute (WASI), Đắk Lắk — the main coffee research institute, which holds the country's largest coffee germplasm collection and breeds and supplies planting material
• Ministry of Agriculture and Environment — the ministry responsible for coffee, called the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development until 2025

Explore Vietnam's coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1Robusta, the species Vietnam runs onWhat separates Coffea canephora from arabica in the plant, the field and the cup.
2. Step 2Phin coffee, including cà phê sữa đáHow Vietnam brews its own coffee: slowly, through a small metal filter, often over condensed milk.
3. Step 3Egg coffeeA Hanoi preparation that shows how far the café culture goes beyond the filter.
4. Step 4Brewing with a phinThe technique on its own: grind, proportions, timing and what goes wrong.
5. Step 5Natural processingThe dry method most Vietnamese coffee goes through, and what drying the whole cherry does.
6. Step 6CatimorThe rust-resistant group that almost all Vietnamese arabica belongs to.
7. Step 7BrazilThe only larger producer, and the other country whose robusta, there called conilon, moves the market.
8. Step 8IndonesiaWhere the first large robusta breeding programme was set up, and where most of Vietnam's robusta came from.
9. Step 9Coffee Expert: species and varietiesThe lesson that sets robusta and arabica side by side and explains what a clone is.
10. Step 10Robusta and conilon cultivarsWhy a robusta variety is a set of clones, and what Vietnam's programme has bred for.
11. Step 11Tasting LabTaste a robusta beside an arabica and write down what you find, without being told what to expect.