Is Vietnam's love of coffee extending, at last, to drinking it too?

Vietnamese consumers have remained remarkably indifferent to the bean, even during the revolution which since the 1980s has taken the country from a small-ranked producer to the second biggest, and the top grower of the robusta variety.

The increase in domestic demand has far lagged growth production, allowing the South East Asian nation's exportable surplus in coffee to jump from 1.1m tonnes to nearly 16m tonnes over the last 20 years.

Vietnamese drink 0.83 kilogrammes of coffee each, far lower than consumers in other exporting countries such as Nicaragua, whose citizens imbibe 2.2kg per capita. Brazilians consume 5.7kg each.

And even that is a modest level compared with rates of consumption in some importing nations such as Switzerland, where demand averages 7.7kg per person, and Norway, where it tops 8.9kg per capita.

'Effective marketing efforts'

However, Vietnam's coffee industry, faced with static export volumes, is making inroads into improving domestic demand, backed by a hefty marketing campaigns.

"Domestic marketers started courting the local market by opening more coffee shops all over the country by introducing stylish cafes such as the Trung Nguyen Café chain, as well as several Western-style coffee shops such as Highlands Coffee, Gloria Jean's," US Department of Agriculture staff in Hanoi said.

For home drinking, they started plugging ground, instant and canned coffee in supermarkets too.

"Home coffee consumption, and young people's coffee drinking habits, continue to increase as more middle-class consumers respond to the coffee industry's effective marketing efforts," the USDA bureau said in a report.

The upshot is that some coffee producers believe that Vietnam's own consumption could reach some 1.7m bags (100,000 tonnes) in 2010-11, which would represent a doubling in three years.

The USDA staff they were "less convinced" of such an achievement, "since there is not any reasonable survey or market research to support this contention".

Quality vs quantity 

An upshot in consumption would come in a good year for production too, by volume at least, with output set to rise by 6.8% t0 18.7m bags, the second highest ever, despite a rain-delayed start to harvest, the report said.

However, "though production is up, quality compared to last year is lower".

"In some coffee-growing areas in Dak Lak province, beans are small this year because the rains came later than normal and farmers had to delay fertilizer application," the briefing said, adding that the number of young tree, in their first season of production, had also affected quality levels.

Consumers may, nonetheless, find themselves competing against a state stockpiling plan as well as exporters for supplies, with the government set this month to rule on proposals for building up an inventory of 5m bags, equivalent to about 300,000 tonnes.