A coffee company from the Central Highlands.

Trung Nguyên began in Buôn Ma Thuột, the main city of Đắk Lắk province in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, which English Wikipedia calls the country’s coffee capital. The company dates its founding to 16 June 1996 and credits its chairman, Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ, saying he started with little more than a bicycle and the ambition to build a famous coffee brand. English Wikipedia, citing the Khaleej Times and VnExpress, names his then-wife Lê Hoàng Diệp Thảo as co-founder, and the legal newspaper Báo Pháp luật Việt Nam ran a series in 2018 on how the couple built the business together.

Vũ grew up in the highlands. Vietnamese Wikipedia says his family moved in 1979 to M’Drắk, a mountain district of Đắk Lắk, and that he enrolled in the medical faculty of Tây Nguyên University in 1992, when he began to study coffee. VnExpress reported that Forbes Asia had called him Vietnam’s “coffee king,” a title National Geographic’s travel blog also used in a 2012 profile.

The company grew through cafés. Its first coffee shop opened in Ho Chi Minh City in 1998, at Nguyễn Kiệm street in Phú Nhuận district, the business site VietnamBiz reported in 2019. Trung Nguyên reached Hanoi in 2000 and spread through franchising, which English Wikipedia says it was the first Vietnamese company to use at home and abroad; by the time the first Hanoi shop opened there were already about 100 outlets. The company says it franchised in Japan and Singapore in 2001, the year it introduced the slogan “Khơi nguồn Sáng tạo” (“Sparking creativity”), and it set up Trung Nguyên Franchising as a separate company in 2011.

G7, factories and weasel coffee.

The product that took Trung Nguyên into supermarkets was G7, an instant coffee launched on 23 November 2003, the business paper Báo Đầu tư reported. The company says it unveiled G7 at the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City with a blind taste test, in which it says 89% of participants preferred G7. In 2012 VietNamNet framed it as “the war between 9-year-old G7 and 100-year-old Nestlé,” and in 2016 The Saigon Times Daily reported that G7 had taken the lead in Vietnam’s instant coffee market. English Wikipedia lists G7 3-in-1 and 2-in-1 mixes, a black coffee and a cappuccino, and the company says it added a G7 Gold line in 2023.

English Wikipedia lists four Trung Nguyên factories, all in Vietnam: an instant coffee factory in Bắc Giang, a roast and ground coffee factory in Buôn Ma Thuột, the Trung Nguyên–Saigon coffee factory and an instant coffee factory in Bình Dương. The Saigon factory, at Mỹ Phước in Bình Dương, was bought from the dairy company Vinamilk in 2010, VnEconomy reported at the time, and the same magazine reported in March 2012 on the inauguration of the Bắc Giang plant, which the company called the largest instant coffee factory in Asia. A roast and ground factory was inaugurated on 20 May 2005. Its blends use Robusta, Arabica and Excelsa beans, English Wikipedia says, citing the company.

The company is also known for weasel coffee, the Vietnamese name for civet coffee. Its Legendee line, the company says, uses enzymes to imitate the effect of the civet’s digestion on the bean. In August 2010 VietNamNet reported Vũ as saying the company had begun producing a small amount of natural weasel coffee under a Weasel sub-brand, from wild or free-range civets, and that it was given to visiting dignitaries. English Wikipedia says the company was chosen to serve coffee at the APEC meetings in Vietnam in 2006, and by 2010, according to fDi Intelligence, its products were exported to more than 60 countries.

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.

A relaunch, a museum and a coffee city.

The brand took its current name in two steps. The company says it launched the Trung Nguyên Legend Café chain in 2016, its 20th year. On 16 June 2018, the 22nd anniversary of the founding, Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ returned to public view after about five years in seclusion and announced the Trung Nguyên Legend coffee brand and a new product line, the investment magazine Nhà Đầu tư reported the next day.

Buôn Ma Thuột remains the centre of the story the company tells. Its World Coffee Museum there was built around a collection bought from the German collector Jens Burg, Thanh Niên reported in 2012; the company dates the museum’s opening to 2018. The company also describes a larger “coffee city” project in the province, with amenities inaugurated in 2021, and says it broke ground on a factory in Đắk Lắk in 2025, the same year it expanded in the United States and co-hosted the Buôn Ma Thuột Coffee Festival. It opened a representative office in Shanghai in 2017 and another in South Korea in 2023, the company says.

Ownership has stayed with the founder. After a divorce case between the two founders, the High People’s Court in Ho Chi Minh City ruled in December 2019 that Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ would keep the shares and control of the Trung Nguyên group, VnExpress reported. Lê Hoàng Diệp Thảo had already set up a separate company in 2016, Trung Nguyên International, whose King Coffee brand is not part of the Trung Nguyên Legend group, English Wikipedia says, citing NNA Asia.

For a design guide, Trung Nguyên shows how a highland coffee house can carry a mass-market instant brand and a “legend” café brand under one founder’s name. Compare Kapal Api, the Indonesian coffee brand, and Vinamilk, which sold Trung Nguyên its Saigon coffee factory. For this guide we use a roast brown, a highland red and a legend gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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