Vietnam’s caffeine thirst puts it in world’s top growing coffee markets

Vietnam has one of the world’s fastest growing retail coffee markets, trailing only behind Indonesia, Turkey and India, a global market intelligence agency said in its latest report.

The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of Vietnam, measuring the average value growth in the 2012-2016 period, stood at 14.9 percent, while Indonesia’s market jumped 19.6 percent, followed by 17.5 percent in Turkey and 15.1 percent in India, Mintel said in the report.

Asian markets, where growth is being driven by a surge in innovative coffee products, make up the majority of the world’s fastest growing coffee markets, while European markets plus Australia are among the slowest, the report said. It did not give any market values.

Even though Germany, the United States, Italy and Spain top the 2016 list of importers of Vietnamese green coffee beans based on Vietnam’s government data, Mintel’s findings suggest that European nations mostly process the bitter variety and re-export the finished products.

Instant coffee dominates the retail market in Asia. Out of the new coffee products launched in 2016, 42 percent were soluble coffee granule products in Asia Pacific, while the figure was 20 percent in Europe and a mere 6 percent in North America.

The global coffee market’s retail volume grew 2.7 percent last year from 2015, slightly up from an annual rise of 2.5 percent the previous year, Mintel said.

“The global coffee industry continues to experience healthy growth, driven by Asian markets in particular,” said Jonny Forsyth, Global Drinks Analyst at Mintel. “Asia has far more growth potential as traditionally tea drinking consumers are converted slowly but surely into coffee drinkers.”

The International Coffee Organization estimated the CAGR of Vietnam’s coffee consumption at 8 percent for the four-year period ending in 2015/2016, the second-fastest growth rate among the world’s coffee exporting nations after the Philippines. The crop year lasts between October and September.

The London-based ICO estimated Vietnam’s coffee consumption at around 140,000 tons in the 2015/2016 season, or 8 percent of output, up slightly from 130,000 tons used domestically the previous season.