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The Issue of Fake Coffee in Vietnam

An archived look at fake coffee in Vietnam in the 2010s, from soy and corn fillers to heavily flavored roasts and the rise of specialty coffee.

When I originally wrote this article in 2017, Vietnam was already one of the world's largest coffee producers, but the coffee I encountered while living there ranged from excellent locally grown specialty beans to products that sometimes contained surprisingly little actual coffee.

This article is a snapshot of that period. Vietnam's coffee culture has changed considerably since then, but the fake-coffee scandals described here were very real, and they were part of what pushed me to look more closely at where my coffee came from.

Weasel Coffee

One of the stranger things about living in Vietnam was the contrast between coffee as an important part of social life and the sometimes questionable substance actually being poured into the glass.

A glass of cà phê sữa đá could be extraordinarily cheap, even when it included condensed milk, ice, a disposable cup and somebody sitting on a tiny plastic chair serving it. Of course, cheap robusta exists and not every inexpensive coffee is suspicious. But during the years I lived in Vietnam there were repeated reports of producers stretching ground coffee with cheaper ingredients such as roasted soybeans and corn.

Sometimes the problem went considerably further than stretching coffee.

When Coffee Contains No Coffee

In 2012, Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Niên published an investigation into workshops producing what the newspaper called cà phê đểu – roughly, fake or dodgy coffee.

Reporters documented soybeans and corn being roasted and treated with coffee flavourings, colouring agents, thickening ingredients and other additives before being sold as coffee. At one workshop, the owner told inspectors that the facility processed around 1.5 tonnes of this kind of product every day.

Later that same year, Vietnamese authorities closed several companies during a larger investigation and seized tonnes of soybeans together with various chemicals and additives.

This was therefore not simply a rumour circulating among suspicious foreign coffee drinkers. There was an actual adulterated-coffee industry.

Economically, the idea is simple enough. Coffee costs money. Soybeans and corn cost considerably less. Once everything has been heavily roasted, ground, flavoured and mixed together, differences become harder for an ordinary customer to identify.

Coffee Adulteration Is Not Uniquely Vietnamese

The problem itself is not uniquely Vietnamese.

In 2014, researchers presented work at a meeting of the American Chemical Society on detecting adulterants in roasted and ground coffee using chromatography. Their research used Brazilian coffee and identified characteristic chemical profiles that could reveal ingredients such as corn, barley, wheat, soybeans, rice and other cheaper materials mixed into coffee.

The researchers reported that their method could identify adulterated samples with high accuracy. Importantly, the study was not evidence that all these ingredients were being used in Vietnam; it demonstrated how economically attractive coffee adulteration can be and how difficult it becomes to recognise once everything has been roasted and ground.

In Vietnam, however, the contemporary newspaper investigations specifically documented soybeans and corn.

And Then There Was the Flavouring

During my years in Vietnam I received many samples of supposedly "pure" coffee from distributors. Quite a few smelled so strongly of something other than coffee that I started asking what had been added.

"What about butter?" became one of my standard questions.

Quite often the answer eventually became yes, something had been added after roasting. Depending on the producer, this might be butter or margarine, together with flavourings intended to create the very dark, rich and oily profile associated with many commercial Vietnamese coffee blends at the time.

This made the whole fake-coffee issue even harder to judge by smell alone. If customers expect an intensely roasted and strongly flavoured product in the first place, the natural aroma of the bean is no longer much of a guide to what is actually inside the package.

That does not mean traditional Vietnamese coffee is somehow "fake". Dark roasting, condensed milk and the phin are genuine parts of Vietnamese coffee culture. The problem begins when cheaper ingredients are substituted for coffee without telling the customer.

Traditional Vietnamese Coffee

The Vietnamese coffee I encountered most often was roasted very dark, frequently considerably darker than the specialty coffee I had become accustomed to. Some roasters also used butter, margarine or additional flavourings as part of their roasting or finishing process.

At Farmer's Blend Coffee in Mui Ne, for example, Dietmar Vogelmann told me that he added a small amount of butter to the warm beans and a dash of rum for his Vietnamese-style blend.

"I experimented with soybeans and other ingredients, to create a product that is similar to the popular brands of coffee in Vietnam," he told me during an interview, "but the process is too complicated and some of the ingredients are too dodgy, so I gave up on soybeans and only process pure coffee beans."

Whether one likes these heavily roasted and flavoured styles is another matter entirely. Personally, the deeper I got into specialty coffee, the more interested I became in tasting the actual bean rather than everything that had been added to it afterwards.

Trying Specialty Coffee for the First Time

One of the interesting things for me was watching people who were accustomed to traditional dark Vietnamese coffee try a much lighter specialty coffee for the first time.

When I took my wife to The Workshop in Saigon back when we were dating, her reaction was:

It is quite sour, but leaves a tingling sensation on the tongue. The coffee is also much lighter and the taste is pleasant. You are encouraged to keep the coffee in your mouth and explore the flavour nuances. Traditional Vietnamese coffee normally is so dark and bitter that you add sugar and milk and even then you often pour it down fast, because you don't really want to taste it.

That difference fascinated me. Neither style has to replace the other, but they encourage completely different ways of drinking coffee.

Condensed Milk and the Phin

Vietnamese coffee culture also developed around ingredients and brewing methods that made sense locally.

Fresh dairy was historically less available in Vietnam than in Europe, while canned sweetened condensed milk was easier to transport and store. During the colonial period it became associated with coffee and eventually developed into something much more than a substitute for fresh milk. The combination of strong coffee, condensed milk and later ice became a drink in its own right: cà phê sữa đá.

The sweetness and thickness of condensed milk work particularly well with very dark roasted robusta.

For black coffee, the Vietnamese term is simply cà phê đen. It can be served hot or over ice and may or may not contain sugar depending on how it is ordered and prepared. In southern Vietnam I encountered sweetened black iced coffee particularly often.

I once ordered a completely unsweetened black roadside coffee.

It was so utterly disgusting that for once I understood why everybody kept trying to put sugar into it.

Vietnamese coffee is commonly brewed with a small metal filter called a phin. Ground coffee sits beneath a perforated press, hot water is poured over it and the drink slowly drips into the cup below, often directly onto condensed milk.

Depending on the filter and the grind, this can take several minutes, which is part of the experience. Coffee in Vietnam was rarely something I saw people gulp down while running for a train. Sitting around drinking it was often the entire point.

At many roadside stalls I also encountered coffee that had already been brewed in advance and stored behind or underneath the counter. A measure would be poured over ice and condensed milk added before serving.

Finding Real Coffee

So how did I find good coffee in Vietnam?

The obvious answer was to know where it came from.

Once I started meeting farmers, roasters and café owners who cared about the beans themselves, the Vietnamese coffee world became considerably more interesting. I tasted excellent Arabica and Robusta grown in Vietnam and discovered a specialty scene that was developing quickly in Saigon, Hanoi and the coffee-growing regions.

At the time I wrote the original version of this article, I was drinking K'Ho coffee at home and considered it one of the best combinations of quality, provenance and price I had found in Vietnam.

That was ultimately the useful side of discovering fake coffee: it made me stop thinking of "Vietnamese coffee" as one single product.

There was commodity coffee, excellent coffee, flavoured coffee, traditional coffee, specialty coffee and, occasionally, something that really should not have been called coffee at all.

Learning to tell the difference became part of my coffee adventure.

Sources

Back to My Coffee Adventure

What happened afterwards?

Vietnam did not simply ignore the problem. In the years after this article was originally written, police and market authorities repeatedly uncovered producers selling coffee adulterated with soybeans, corn and other ingredients. A particularly notorious food-safety scandal in Đắk Nông in 2018 prompted the Prime Minister himself to order an investigation, and five people involved were eventually sentenced to prison terms of around seven to eight years.

Enforcement against counterfeit and adulterated food has since become part of Vietnam's wider campaigns against commercial fraud and fake goods, involving police, market-surveillance and food-safety authorities. Together with the rapid development of Vietnam's legitimate coffee industry, this makes the situation rather different from the one I encountered when I first wrote this article.

I would not claim that fake coffee has disappeared completely. Police were still uncovering producers using soybeans and corn as coffee substitutes in 2026. The important change is that this is no longer something that can simply be dismissed as a peculiar feature of the local coffee market: Vietnamese authorities now clearly treat serious adulteration as fraud and, where food safety is involved, as a criminal offence.