Specialty Coffee Wiki

Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association

Properties3
descriptionThe trade association for the world's second-largest coffee producer, founded in Da Lat in 1990. Its export numbers are the figures the Vietnamese government and the world's press quote — and they are almost the only thing it publishes.
tagsorganization, national-body, vietnam, robusta, export, trade-association, cocoa
aliasesVICOFA, Vicofa, Hiệp hội Cà phê - Ca cao Việt Nam, Hiệp hội Cà phê Ca cao Việt Nam, Vietnam Coffee - Cocoa Association, Viet Nam Coffee and Cocoa Association, Vietnam Coffee Cocoa Association, organizations/vietnam-coffee-and-cocoa-association

11 min read

Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association

VICOFA is the trade association for Vietnam’s coffee and cocoa businesses. Its Vietnamese name is Hiệp hội Cà phê - Ca cao Việt Nam; in English it styles itself the Vietnam Coffee - Cocoa Association, and everyone uses the short form Vicofa.12

It is worth being precise about what kind of body this is, because Vietnam’s position makes people assume more than the evidence supports. VICOFA is not a government department like India’s Coffee Board of India, not a research institute, and not a certifier. It is a membership association — companies, farms, exporters and processors join it — covering both coffee and cocoa in one organisation, which is unusual. Most of this wiki’s other national bodies handle a single crop.

The thing that makes it matter far beyond Vietnam is much simpler than its constitution: VICOFA is where the export numbers come from. When a ministry, a wire service or a trading desk quotes how much coffee Vietnam shipped last month, the figure usually traces back to this association. For the origin that supplies most of the world’s Robusta, that makes VICOFA a piece of global price information, not just a domestic lobby.

Vietnamese nameHiệp hội Cà phê - Ca cao Việt Nam1
English nameVietnam Coffee - Cocoa Association2
AbbreviationVICOFA / Vicofa12
Founded4 January 1990, Da Lat, Lâm Đồng2
State approval22 January 1990, Decision 28/KTĐN-TCCB2
ChairmanNguyễn Nam Hải1
Offices135A Pasteur (5th floor), Ho Chi Minh City · 5 Ông Ích Khiêm, Ba Đình, Hanoi1
Stated valuesSustainability · Productivity · Quality · Added value1
Origin it representsVietnam

Where it came from

VICOFA was founded at a founding-members’ conference on 4 January 1990 in Da Lat, in Lâm Đồng province, and formally approved by the state on 22 January 1990 under Decision 28/KTĐN-TCCB, issued by the ministry then responsible for foreign economic relations. Its current bylaws were approved by the Ministry of Home Affairs on 29 July 2008 (Decision 1038/QĐ-BNV). It describes itself as a non-profit professional association for individuals and enterprises in coffee and cocoa production, processing, trade, export, research and training.2

The date is the interesting part. 1990 is four years after the Đổi Mới reforms that legalised private enterprise in Vietnam — the reforms the Vietnam coffee market note identifies as the trigger for the country’s explosive coffee growth. VICOFA is a product of that opening: an association of businesses, created at the moment there were businesses to associate. It is roughly the same age as the industry it represents, which is not true of any other major origin’s coffee body.

The founding venue says something too. Da Lat is Arabica country — Vietnam’s small highland Arabica pocket — not the Robusta heartland around Buôn Ma Thuột where the volume actually is.

What it publishes: the export record

VICOFA’s most visible output is crop-year and calendar-year export statistics, which the Vietnamese government reproduces and the trade press repeats worldwide. The most recent full crop year on the record here was an extraordinary one.

PeriodVolumeValueAverage price
Crop year 2024–25 (Oct 2024 – Sep 2025)over 1.5 million tonnes, +1.8%over USD 8.4 billion, +55.5%USD 5,610/tonne, +52.7%3
Oct 2024 – Jul 2025about 1.35 million tonnesUSD 7.5 billion—4
Jan – Jul 2025 (calendar)about 1.1 million tonnes, +7.4%USD 6 billion, +65%over USD 5,670/tonne, +53%4

Read the middle column against the right-hand one and the story is unmistakable. Volume went up 1.8%. Value went up 55.5%. Vietnam did not sell much more coffee in 2024–25; it sold roughly the same coffee for well over half as much again, because the world price of Robusta rose. The 2024–25 crop year was the first time Vietnam’s coffee export revenue passed USD 7 billion — and it finished past 8.4.34

That is the clearest single illustration of the point the C-market and Climate change and coffee notes both make: Robusta stopped being the cheap species. Supply pressure in Vietnam and Brazil pushed the Robusta contract to levels that made a flat crop worth billions more. An association’s statistics bulletin is an odd place to find that fact, but this is where it lives.

To verify — how the crop-year figure sits against the calendar-year one

This wiki’s Vietnam coffee market note records, from Wikipedia, that Vietnam exported 1.62 million tonnes in calendar year 2023.5 The VICOFA crop-year figure above is over 1.5 million tonnes for October 2024 to September 2025, described as 1.8% up on the previous crop year.3 Those two numbers are not directly comparable — different twelve-month windows, and possibly different definitions of what counts as a coffee export — but taken naively they would imply the 2023 calendar year outshipped both recent crop years. No reconciliation of the two series was found, and no ICO or customs release was read here. Do not build a trend line out of them, and do not quote a single “Vietnam exports X tonnes” number as settled.

What the ICO says about it — and why that sits in a warning

The most substantive institutional description of VICOFA in the research behind this note comes from the International Coffee Organization’s country profile of Vietnam. It could not be read.

To verify — the entire ICO characterisation of VICOFA is unread here

The ICO’s Country Coffee Profile: Vietnam (document ICC 124-9e) is cited for four claims, none of which could be confirmed: that VICOFA has more than 100 members spanning state-owned enterprises, private companies, large farms, foreign-invested companies, banks, a commodity exchange and WASI (the Western Highlands Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute); that VICOFA was instrumental in Vietnam joining the ICO in 1991; that it is “independent” in form but “in reality more of a government-affiliated organization”; and that it is financed by both its members and the government.6 The PDF was fetched and returned unreadable binary, so every one of these is reported-by-the-research-rather-than-verified. The ICO is a top-tier source and the claims are plausible, but VICOFA’s own site states no member count, no founding date and no mission statement anywhere that was found,1 and no second source corroborates any of them. Treat the “government-affiliated in practice” characterisation in particular as an outside assessment, not an established fact.

That gap matters more than a missing statistic would. Whether VICOFA is an independent industry body or an arm of the state is the central question about it, and it is precisely the question the available sources cannot answer from here.

To verify — where the headquarters actually is

The two sources disagree about the association’s seat. Vietnamese Wikipedia gives the headquarters as 5 Ông Ích Khiêm, Ba Đình, Hanoi.2 VICOFA’s own current website lists a Ho Chi Minh City address first — 135A Pasteur, 5th floor — with the Ông Ích Khiêm address as a second office.1 The likeliest explanation is simply that the association’s centre of gravity moved south toward the trade, and the encyclopedia entry is stale; the official site is the better source and is used above. But no registration document or bylaw stating the legal headquarters was read, so which office is the registered seat is unresolved.

What it is not

VICOFA does not run a competition, an auction or a scoring programme. No VICOFA cupping score, hammer price, lot catalogue or named buyer appears anywhere in the sources behind this note. Vietnam’s national green-coffee contest, the Vietnam Amazing Cup, is run by a different and separate body — the Buôn Ma Thuột Coffee Association, based in the Đắk Lắk provincial capital. Do not attribute that competition or its winners to VICOFA.

VICOFA does not grow, process or sell coffee. It is an association of the companies that do. There is no VICOFA farm, no VICOFA lot and no VICOFA estate.

This is the same true-and-unsurprising answer that holds for ICAFE, IHCAFE and the Coffee Board of India: a national coffee body’s output is statistics, representation and paperwork, and the score sheet carries a farmer’s name.

Why it matters

Because of what it is the only public record of.

The Vietnam coffee market note sets out the central strangeness of this origin: the world’s second-largest coffee producer has essentially no public price discovery on quality — no Cup of Excellence-style auction, no published scores attached to named farms, no lot-level record of who grew what and what it sold for. What Vietnam does have is aggregate export tonnage and aggregate export value, released by a trade association, for the whole country at once.

That contrast is the whole picture in two numbers. Vietnam can tell you, to the tonne, how much coffee it shipped and what the average price per tonne was. It cannot tell you what any single farm’s coffee was worth. For an origin trying to move from volume to value — which is what “added value” in VICOFA’s own stated values means — the second number is the one that would change things, and the association is not the body producing it.

There is a second reason to watch this organisation specifically. Fine Robusta — the grading standard written to score Robusta on its own terms — is the instrument that would give Vietnamese coffee a quality record, and this wiki’s note on it identifies Vietnam as the origin with most at stake in the standard. A national trade association with more than a hundred members, covering the exporters and the processors, is the obvious body to carry a standard like that into general use. Whether it has is not established here.

Footnotes

  1. Vietnam Coffee - Cocoa Association (Vicofa) — official site — confirmed via WebFetch: the Vietnamese and English names, the Vicofa abbreviation, Chairman Nguyễn Nam Hải, the 135A Pasteur (Ho Chi Minh City) and 5 Ông Ích Khiêm (Hanoi) offices with their phone numbers, and the “Bền vững - Năng suất - Chất lượng - Giá trị gia tăng” values line. The site states no founding date, member count or mission statement anywhere found. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Hiệp hội Cà phê Ca cao Việt Nam — Vietnamese Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch: the English name “Vietnam Coffee - Cocoa Association” and the VICOFA abbreviation, the 4 January 1990 founding conference in Da Lat, Lâm Đồng, the 22 January 1990 state approval under Decision 28/KTĐN-TCCB, the 29 July 2008 bylaws (Decision 1038/QĐ-BNV), the Hanoi headquarters address, and the non-profit professional-association self-description ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Coffee exports hit record high of $8.4 bln — Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, Viet Nam, 27 October 2025 — confirmed via WebFetch; source, attributed to VICOFA, of the 2024–25 crop-year figures: over 1.5 million tonnes, over USD 8.4 billion, +1.8% volume, +55.5% value and an average USD 5,610 per tonne ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Vietnam’s coffee exports in 2025: breaking records, targeting $8 billion — Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, Viet Nam, 3 September 2025 — confirmed via WebFetch; source, attributed to VICOFA, of the January–July 2025 figures (≈1.1 million tonnes, USD 6 billion, +7.4% / +65%, average over USD 5,670 per tonne) and the October 2024–July 2025 crop-year-to-date figures (≈1.35 million tonnes, USD 7.5 billion, first crop year past USD 7 billion) ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Wikipedia — Coffee production in Vietnam — the 1.62 million tonne calendar-2023 export figure recorded on this wiki’s Vietnam coffee market note, cited here only for the comparison flagged above ↩

  6. International Coffee Organization — Country Coffee Profile: Vietnam (ICC 124-9e) — cited in the research behind this note for the 100-plus membership and its composition, the 1991 ICO accession, the “government-affiliated in reality” characterisation and the mixed member-and-government financing; the PDF was fetched and returned unreadable binary, so none of it was read first-hand ↩

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