Many young business owners who are still in college dared to go where no one has gone before and opened the first takeaway cafés to serve Ho Chi Minh’s young urbanites.

An Effoc Cafe owned by Phung Manh Viet, Photo: Tuoitre

In 2008, when he was a freshman at Hoa Sen University (Ho Chi Minh), Phung Manh Viet (born in 1988) was given an assignment to design a small and practical business project.

After giving it some thoughts, Viet decided a mobile café was the simplest and most convenient plan he could do, from which came the idea for his now four-store takeaway café chain Effoc.

“I asked myself then why I would not press ahead with the business plan,” he recalled.
After three months, he started a small mobile Italian café shop on Dinh Cong Trang street (District 1, HCMC) on an initial budget of VND 40 million (about USD 2,000). That was also the first shop in the Italian-style Effoc café chain.

Viet said with an average price of VND 20,000 per coffee, only one-fourth of that of many upscale foreign coffee brands in the city, his shops targeted college students and office workers.

Opened in July 2010, the Caztus shop owned by 22-year-old Nguyen Huu Tuan Thanh is another example. On a trip to Singapore, Thanh found out about Starbucks and liked it so much he went there seven days in a row.

“Why don’t I open a store like this in Vietnam but has a cheaper price for students?” Thanh recalled his impression then.

One month after that trip, he visited many café shops around Ho Chi Minh and spent days observing and learning their service, business management and how to make the best coffee. His first shop was launched on Luong Huu Khanh street, District 1, followed by a second one on Vo Thi Sau, District 1 not long after that.

For 21-year-old Le Ngoc Khanh, a student of the International University, the youngest of the four owners of Urban Station Coffee, she and her friends started their business with quite a simple reason, “The coffee we have at our school’s cafeteria really sucks.”

Khanh said they chose the takeaway style, still a new service in Vietnam, as it is faster and more suitable to the fast-changing lifestyle of the young population in an urban center like Ho Chi Minh.

Viet and Thanh said there were many opportunities in the café business for young businessmen like them, but so were the challenges.

Starting from scratch, learning how to make a good coffee and trying to balance their schedule between school and work, these young businesspersons dream of a day when they can expand their Vietnamese takeaway cafe brands beyond the country’s borders.

Source: Tuoitre