PRESS REVUE – The bridge for Vietnamese coffee

MILAN – Len Brault has managed a private design and marketing company since
1985, has marketed many companies and products worth over US$400 million in the
US.
In 2005, he thought of opening an online company to sell coffee only, a
product that he really likes. He spent several months choosing coffee. “I bought
many types of coffee to evaluate their quality. When I tasted Trung Nguyen
coffee, I immediately liked it,” said Brault.
He contacted Trung Nguyen to
order coffee and open a
website www.trung-nguyen-online.com to
make online transactions.
Brault chose Trung Nguyen coffee not only for its
flavour but also Trung Nguyen’s Utz Kapeh international certificate, which
proves that Trung Nguyen products are safe and produced responsibly, which is
very important for the picky customers in the US.
Brault is generally
satisfied with Trung Nguyen’s working style but according to him, there are some
points that Trung Nguyen needs to solve to operate more effectively. For
example, the time for goods delivery is quite long – sometimes taking up to
eight weeks – and Trung Nguyen’s packing has some things not suitable to the
retailing system of the US or English-speaking countries.
Ngo Manh Kha, Trung
Nguyen’s representative in charge of orders from Brault, told Tuoi Tre Newspaper
that Trung Nguyen currently had over ten large and medium distributors in the US
but Len was the sole distributor via the Internet.
In terms of scale, Brault
is a small distributor (each order is only 250 boxes of coffee) but his online
distribution makes Trung Nguyen coffee always available to customers
everywhere.
 “Mr Brault is a bridge between Americans and Vietnamese
through the culture of enjoying coffee. For us, he is not a partner, but a good
friend,” Mr Kha said.
Brault’s online sale of coffee prospers with a monthly
growth rate of 15 to 20%. He said that the difference was that he targeted all
coffee drinkers in the US while most other importers of Trung Nguyen coffee only
had shops in California and sold coffee to Asian people.
Brault said that he
had been surprised to receive many orders from Canada (the Adwords programme
that he uses to advertise his website is limited to the US). He is about to
establish a distribution company to deliver coffee in Toronto, Canada.

Marketing the ‘coffee culture’  “Under the influence of ‘coffee
experts’, many American people think that only Arabica coffee is high-grade and
they only drink this kind of coffee. This conception is wrong. Not only American
people will be at a disadvantage because they lose the chance to enjoy different
flavours of coffee but also the growing of coffee will be affected,” Brault
said.
Trung Nguyen coffee is a mixture of various kinds of coffee like
Arabica, Robusta, Chari, Catimor so its flavour is better than coffee products
that are simply processed from Arabica coffee. The appearance of Trung Nguyen
coffee will surely create a new wave. With that belief, this American man, who
has never come to Vietnam, is trying to apply his 21 years of marketing
experience to bring Trung Nguyen coffee to North America.
 “My goal is
to introduce American people to the tradition of Vietnamese coffee, the style of
Vietnamese coffee producers and the way Vietnamese coffee is processed. I hope
that Vietnamese coffee will find a worthy position in the awareness of American
coffee drinkers,” Brault said.
 (Source: Tuoi Tre)