Bách Hóa Xanh Brand Guidelines: Mobile World’s “Modern Wet Market” Grocery Chain

A grocery trial inside an electronics group.

Bách Hóa Xanh is the grocery chain of Mobile World Investment Corporation (MWG), the Ho Chi Minh City group behind the Thế Giới Di Động phone stores and the Điện Máy Xanh appliance chain. MWG began piloting what VnExpress International called a “modern wet market” concept in late 2015, the outlet reported in August 2018, describing Bách Hóa Xanh as a minimart and food-store chain focused on fresh food and daily essentials. A February 2019 VnExpress International report says the business was incorporated in 2015, and MWG’s own company history also dates the pilot of the mini-supermarket chain to late 2015.

The early years were hard going. In February 2019 VnExpress International wrote that analyses by securities companies had pointed to poor locations, a lack of standardised stores, a narrow market segment and fierce competition. The chain then opened stores 30 to 40 kilometres outside the city to serve semi-urban areas, standardised its outlets and closed around 100 that were not profitable, and by the end of 2018 it had 400 stores, according to the 2019 report. In August 2018 VnExpress International also described a newer, larger store model of about 300 square metres, almost double the earlier size. Analysts at Ho Chi Minh City Securities Corporation told the outlet that the short shelf life of seafood and fresh vegetables made the chain harder to manage, including keeping wastage down.

The name is plain Vietnamese. “Bách hóa” is an everyday term for general goods, as in a general store, and “xanh” means green; the same colour word appears in the name of the group’s appliance chain, Điện Máy Xanh.

Fresh food first, then a hard reset.

What the chain sells has stayed close to its first idea. VnExpress International listed vegetables, seafood, meat and fast-moving consumer goods in 2019, and in May 2024 reported that Bách Hóa Xanh focuses on fresh foods and on the south of Vietnam, offering daily discounts on fresh food that is close to its expiry date to cut down on disposal. The Investor reported in June 2025 that the chain runs its own logistics, outsourcing very little, and opens distribution centres in step with new stores rather than building them in advance.

Payment moved onto phones. In December 2022 Vietnam News reported that the e-wallet MoMo, already one of the payment options on the chain’s online shopping channel, could now be used alongside cash and cards at more than 500 Bách Hóa Xanh stores in Ho Chi Minh City.

Then came a reset. The Investor reported in June 2025 that the store count had peaked at 2,140 in April 2022, before the company began restructuring. VnExpress International reported in December 2023 that the chain had wrapped up that restructuring, closing 400 stores and keeping 1,697. New openings resumed in July 2024, cautiously at first, The Investor said. In the same period MWG went looking for an outside shareholder for the grocery business; English Wikipedia says the search began in 2022, when the group explored selling up to 20 percent of the chain.

Design and documentation.

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce platforms present themselves first through their apps. The home screen of a marketplace carries its name, a run of category icons, banners for the current sale and links to payments, top-ups and delivery services, and that screen does much of the work a shop front once did. Tokopedia, which English Wikipedia says took its name from the Indonesian word for “shop” and the word “encyclopedia,” and Bukalapak, whose name means “open a market stall,” both chose plain Indonesian words that describe what the service does.

Shopping-festival dates and partner programmes carry much of the identity beyond the app. Date-named sales, celebrity brand ambassadors and seasonal campaigns appear on the platforms’ own pages and in the local press; Indonesian Wikipedia records Tokopedia’s ambassadors from 2014 onwards. Programmes for small shops, such as Mitra Tokopedia and Mitra Bukalapak for family-run warungs, take the platform name off the screen and onto counters, signs and receipts.

For Vietnam’s retailers — phone and electronics chains, grocery chains and supermarket groups — the store fascia is a public face alongside the app and the website, and the companies’ corporate pages set out their store formats, sister banners and owners. Store counts and formats in this guide are given only as a dated source reports them.

Corporate pages and the press also carry the ownership story, which in this region often changes the brand itself. Tokopedia merged with Gojek into GoTo in May 2021, TechCrunch reported, and in 2024 it took in TikTok Shop’s Indonesian business, while Bukalapak listed in Jakarta in August 2021 and ended its physical-goods marketplace in early 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — founders, owners, listings and mergers — and says plainly when a fact rests only on the company’s own word.

A minority investor, then a push north.

In April 2024 the Chinese investment firm CDH Investments, through Green Bee 2 Private Limited, completed the purchase of a 5 percent stake in Bách Hóa Xanh, The Investor reported. The chain then had around 1,700 stores across southern and south-central Vietnam, the same report said. In May 2024 VnExpress International counted 1,696 Bách Hóa Xanh stores, with the chain prioritising the south, holding a small number in the Central Highlands and none in the north; it compared that with 3,667 stores at WinCommerce, the Masan Group subsidiary that runs WinMart.

Growth came quickly after that. The chain opened 410 stores in the first five months of 2025 to reach 2,180, passing its 2022 peak, The Investor reported in June 2025, adding that new stores in central Vietnam were run with lower operating costs than standard stores. MWG’s company history says Bách Hóa Xanh expanded into central Vietnam and began building a presence in the north. On 7 May 2026 Vietstock reported that the chain had opened its first store in Hà Nội, in Đa Phúc commune on the border with Bắc Ninh province, where it already had 12 stores; the chain’s website then listed 141 stores in northern Vietnam. Of the 280 stores opened in the first quarter of 2026, 68 percent were in the south, 18 percent in the north and 14 percent in the centre, the same report said.

For a design guide, Bách Hóa Xanh shows how a grocery chain can share a plain colour word with its sister stores while building a fresh-food identity of its own. Compare Thế Giới Di Động, the group’s phone chain, and WinMart, Masan’s grocery chain. For this guide we use a leaf green, a lime, a cream and a deep forest ink with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bách Hóa Xanh’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.