From a 1993 start to a listed food group.

Kinh Đô — the name means “capital city” in Vietnamese — began in Ho Chi Minh City in 1993. English Wikipedia gives its first legal name as Kinh Do Construction and Food Processing Company Limited. KIDO Group, the listed company that grew out of it, names four co-founders: Trần Kim Thành, now its chairman; Trần Lệ Nguyên, its vice chairman and chief executive; and Vương Bửu Linh and Vương Ngọc Xiềm, both board members and deputy chief executives.

Growth came through new production lines, several of them imported. English Wikipedia says the company began building a factory in Thủ Đức, then a district of the city, in 1996, and installed a cookie line with Danish equipment at the same time. Lines for bread and sponge cake followed in 1997–1998, along with a chocolate line, and around 2000–2001 came cracker lines from Europe, a hard-candy line and a fondant line. In 2001 a second factory in Hưng Yên, south-east of Hanoi, began supplying the capital and the northern provinces, and the company began exporting, English Wikipedia says, to markets including the United States, France, Japan and Singapore. In 2002 it took the name Kinh Do Corporation.

KIDO Group’s own timeline fills in the corporate story. It dates the company’s mooncakes to 1998; English Wikipedia instead says Kinh Đô entered the mooncake market in 2002, so the two sources differ. The timeline says a northern company, Kinh Đô Miền Bắc, was set up in 2000 and first sold shares to the public in 2004; that the group bought Wall’s ice-cream factory from Unilever in 2003 and set up an ice-cream company, KIDO’S; that the main company held its initial public offering in 2005; and that it took a majority stake in the food company Vinabico in 2008. In 2010 the separate companies were merged into one group, and in 2011, the timeline says, it entered a partnership with the Japanese confectioner Ezaki Glico.

Mooncakes, gift boxes and the Mid-Autumn season.

The name is closely linked to the Mid-Autumn Festival, Tết Trung Thu, the season for mooncakes. Launching the 2026 collection, Mondelez Kinh Do said that for nearly 30 years Kinh Đô had been part of the Mid-Autumn celebrations of millions of Vietnamese families, VnExpress International reported in July 2026.

The same report describes the 2026 range and its packaging: a premium Trăng Vàng (“golden moon”) line with redesigned gift boxes; the Pha Lê Vạn Phúc and An Phúc collections, built around full-moon imagery and themes of peace and prosperity; a Trăng Vàng Quế Hoa Vọng Nguyệt edition that the company says draws on the Ngự chế thi, poetry written by emperors of the Nguyễn dynasty; and a collection of small lava-filled mooncakes aimed at younger buyers. The company described its premium boxes as using East Asian aesthetics, premium materials and decorative printing, and said editions sold online carry illustrations inspired by traditional Vietnamese folk games.

Mondelēz International lists the local brands made by Mondelez Kinh Do as Cosy biscuits, Kinh Đô mooncakes and fresh bread, Solite cakes, Slide potato chips and AFC crackers, made alongside global brands such as Oreo and Ritz. Mondelez Kinh Do has its head office in Ho Chi Minh City and two factories, at Bình Dương, north of the city, and at Hưng Yên in the north; the company says it employs more than 2,100 people in Vietnam. English Wikipedia, citing VnEconomy in 2023, gave a figure of more than 3,000, so the numbers have changed over time.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Vietnam: Kinh Đô, Bibica, TH true MILK, Saigon, Bia Hà Nội, Vissan and Cholimex. Vietnamese food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from businesses that began as state enterprises to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a street-side 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 moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the city 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.

One name, two companies.

The Kinh Đô name and the company its founders built have gone separate ways. In 2014 the American snack group Mondelēz International, maker of Oreo and Milka, agreed to buy 80% of Kinh Do Corporation’s snack business, and in 2015 that business became Mondelez Kinh Do Vietnam, English Wikipedia says. In August 2016 Mondelez bought the remaining 20%, taking full ownership, VnExpress International reported; the paper said Kinh Do Corp had left the snack business and that the brand had become Mondelez Kinh Do. The biscuits, cakes, bread and mooncakes sold as Kinh Đô are therefore Mondelez products, made in its Vietnamese factories.

The listed company kept going under a new name, KIDO Group, and moved into everyday foods. Its timeline lists the Đại Gia Đình instant noodles in 2014; a 65% stake in the Tường An cooking-oil company and 24% of the oil firm Vocarimex in 2016, raised to 51% in 2017; and 51% of the cooking-oil maker Golden Hope Nhà Bè in 2018, which became KIDO Nhà Bè. In 2021 VnExpress International reported that KIDO held 43.5% of Vietnam’s ice-cream market and was preparing new products through a beverage joint venture with Vinamilk; the paper reported in December 2022 that the two companies had ended that venture.

KIDO later returned to the bakery trade it had sold. Its timeline says it went back into cakes and confectionery in 2021 and back into mooncakes in 2022, and in 2023 it bought 68% of the Thọ Phát bakery brand. Its mooncakes now appear under the name KIDO’s Bakery, its website shows, while its businesses are grouped into cooking oils, seasonings and bakery. The result is that two companies sell mooncakes each Mid-Autumn, one under the old Kinh Đô name and one run by the people who created it.

For a design guide, Kinh Đô shows how a seasonal gift box can carry a brand through a change of owner. Compare Bibica, the Biên Hòa confectioner that also sells Mid-Autumn mooncakes, and Glico, the Japanese confectioner that partnered with Kinh Đô in 2011. For this guide we use a lantern red, a lacquer red and a moon gold with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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