A dairy company assembled from the south’s factories.

Vinamilk is the trading name of the Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Company, in Vietnamese Công ty Cổ phần Sữa Việt Nam, and its current logo carries the date 1976. Vietnamese Wikipedia, citing a 2007 United Nations Development Programme study of Vietnam’s largest firms, says the company was formed that year as the Southern Milk and Coffee Company (Công ty Sữa – Cà phê Miền Nam), under the southern food-industry administration, after the government nationalised three dairy plants. They were the Thống Nhất factory, which had operated since 1965 as Foremost Dairies Vietnam; the Trường Thọ factory, set up in 1972 as Cosuvina by ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, according to the newspaper Lao Động; and the Dielac powdered-milk plant, an unfinished Nestlé project.

The company’s name followed the reorganisation of the economy. In 1982 it passed to the Ministry of Food Industry and became the Milk–Coffee–Confectionery Union Enterprise I, which also took in the Lubico confectionery factory and the Bích Chi nutritional-powder factory in Đồng Tháp province. In March 1992 it was renamed Vietnam Dairy Company (Vinamilk), under the Ministry of Light Industry, and narrowed its work to milk and dairy products, Vietnamese Wikipedia says.

Growth in the 1990s came region by region. A dairy factory in Hanoi followed in 1994 to serve the north. A joint venture with a frozen-food company in Quy Nhơn created a dairy plant in Bình Định province in 1996, giving the company a base in central Vietnam, and a factory in the Trà Nóc industrial zone in Cần Thơ, built for the Mekong Delta, opened in May 2001. Through those years the brand used one slogan, “Sức khỏe và trí tuệ” — “Health and intelligence” — which Vietnamese Wikipedia dates from 1976 to 2004.

Equitisation, a listing and factories at home and abroad.

Vinamilk became a joint-stock company in November 2003, part of Vietnam’s programme of equitising state enterprises, and took the ticker VNM. Its shares were listed on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange on 19 January 2006; at that point the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC), the government’s investment holding company, held 50.01% of its charter capital, Vietnamese Wikipedia says. Foreign investors became large shareholders too. Shareholder data from 2017 cited by English Wikipedia lists F&N Dairy Investments, part of Singapore’s Fraser and Neave (F&N) group, with 16.5%, and says F&N has had two representatives on the board.

The listed company expanded by buying and building. It bought Saigon Dairy Joint Stock Company in 2004, took full control of the Bình Định joint venture in 2005 and opened a factory in the Cửa Lò industrial zone in Nghệ An province on 30 June 2005. Its dairy-farm programme began in November 2006 with the purchase of a farm in Tuyên Quang province with about 1,400 cows, and in September 2007 it bought a controlling 55% of Lam Sơn Dairy in Thanh Hóa province. In 2013 the first phase of its Mega factory, at the Mỹ Phước 2 industrial zone in Bình Dương province, began operating with a capacity of 400 million litres of milk a year. The company describes its Vinamilk Organic farm in Đà Lạt, opened in 2017, as Vietnam’s first organic dairy farm.

Vietnamese Wikipedia lists more than a dozen Vinamilk factories in Vietnam, from Thống Nhất, Trường Thọ and Sài Gòn in Ho Chi Minh City to Dielac in Đồng Nai, Tiên Sơn in Bắc Ninh, Đà Nẵng, Cần Thơ and the Bình Dương complex. Abroad, the company owns Angkor Dairy Products in Cambodia, maker of the Angkormilk brand, whose factory was inaugurated in 2016; it agreed to take full ownership in 2017, the Phnom Penh Post reported. In 2016 it bought the remaining 30% of Driftwood Dairy, a milk processor in El Monte, California, the Vietnam Investment Review reported. Its brands include Dielac, Ông Thọ condensed milk, Susu, Probi and Green Farm, and the government news portal Báo Chính phủ reported in April 2024 that Vinamilk products had reached more than 60 countries and territories.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food and drink, and they come from Indonesia and Vietnam: ABC, Bango, Kapal Api, Teh Botol Sosro, Vinamilk, Trung Nguyên and Mayora. Food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a roadside stall to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Slogans, logos and a 2023 wordmark.

Vinamilk has changed its logo and slogan several times. Vietnamese Wikipedia records new company logos on 20 August 2006 and again in 2012, and a run of slogans: “Chất lượng quốc tế, chất lượng Vinamilk” (“International quality, Vinamilk quality”) from 2004; “Cuộc sống tươi đẹp” (“A beautiful life”) from 2007; “Niềm tin Việt Nam” (“Vietnam’s trust”) from 2009; and “Vươn cao Việt Nam” (“Reaching higher, Vietnam”), used from 2010 to 2022. The brand was also a broadcast sponsor: from 2008 to 2013 it backed the children’s singing programme Đồ Rê Mí.

The latest change came on 6 July 2023, when the company launched a new brand identity after 47 years. The Vietnamese marketing site Backstage reported on 14 July 2023 that Vinamilk had moved from an emblem to a wordmark, set in a vivid blue on a cream ground, with a smile in the dot of the “i” and a milk drop in the letter “a,” and had kept the founding date as “EST 1976.” The new system used a tropical palette that the company linked to Vietnamese food culture, and a brand spirit summed up as “Bold, determined, always true to ourselves,” alongside the English lines “Born to care” and “Care to change.” Backstage said the work involved 55 creative specialists from around the world and quoted chief executive Mai Kiều Liên on reflecting “the energy, passion and potential of Vietnamese people.” Vietnamese Wikipedia shows packs with the old and new logos side by side.

Recognition has come from both state and trade. Vinamilk was named a Hero of Labour in 2000 and received the Independence Order, third class, in 2005 and 2016, Vietnamese Wikipedia says. In 2023 the radio station VOH reported that it had become the first Vietnamese milk brand to receive three stars in the International Taste Institute’s Superior Taste Award. In July 2026 the state news agency’s Báo Tin tức reported on the company’s 50th-anniversary ceremony, attended by Vice-President Võ Thị Ánh Xuân.

For a design guide, Vinamilk shows how a state dairy built from three nationalised plants can turn half a century of emblems and slogans into a single friendly wordmark. Compare Amul, India’s dairy co-operative brand, and Trung Nguyên, the Vietnamese coffee company that bought a coffee factory from Vinamilk in 2010. For this guide we use a Vinamilk blue, a cream and a tropical green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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