From Bac A Bank to a farm in Nghệ An.

TH true MILK is the best-known brand of TH Group, a Vietnamese food and drink company whose founder is Thái Hương, a businesswoman from Đô Lương district in the central province of Nghệ An. Vietnamese Wikipedia says she trained in accounting and finance at the National Economics University, worked in state finance and building-materials jobs in the 1980s, moved to private business in 1990, and in 1994 co-founded Bac A Commercial Joint Stock Bank, where she served as vice-chair and general director.

The dairy came later. Vietnamese Wikipedia, citing the investment newspaper Báo Đầu tư, says she decided to make fresh milk in 2008, after news of the melamine-contaminated milk scandal in China; the company’s own founder page tells the same story and says the dairy-farming and milk-processing project began that year. The group itself dates from 2009, according to both the company and Vietnamese Wikipedia, which cites a 2018 report in Báo Tài nguyên & Môi trường for the start of a large dairy-farm project in Nghĩa Đàn district, Nghệ An.

The company says the farm’s first milking came on 25 July 2010, when a calf it named “May” was born. On 26 December 2010, TH Milk Joint Stock Company launched TH true MILK, Vietnamese Wikipedia says, citing a March 2011 report in the business paper Nhịp sống kinh tế. The letters stand for “True Happiness,” the company says, and its brand is written with a capital TH, a lower-case “true” and a capitalised product word — the pattern later repeated across its range.

One naming system, many products.

TH built its range on that naming formula. According to the company’s timeline, it opened its first TH true mart shop in Hanoi in May 2011 and another in Ho Chi Minh City that August, inaugurated the first phase of its fresh-milk factory in July 2013, and launched TH true YOGURT the same month. Products for children followed under the TOPKID name in 2014, alongside a school-milk line.

The list grew beyond dairy. The company dates TH true BUTTER and TH true CHEESE to December 2016, TH true MILK Organic and the herbal drink TH true Herbal to August 2017, the nut milk TH true NUT to March 2018, the malt drink TH true MALT to May 2018 and TH true ICE CREAM to June 2018, then TH true RICE and TH true JUICE to early 2020. Its brands page also lists TH true WATER, its schools and its medical project, all carrying the same two letters.

The farms spread too. The company says it has dairy projects in several provinces beyond Nghệ An, including Thanh Hóa, Hà Giang, Phú Yên, Kon Tum and An Giang. Abroad, it says it broke ground on dairy-farm complexes in the Moscow and Kaluga regions of Russia in 2016, opened its first Moscow-region farm in January 2018 and began a milk plant in Kaluga that September. It also says that in October 2019 it became the first Vietnamese company granted an official code to export fresh milk to China.

The scale has been reported in the Vietnamese press. Vietnamese Wikipedia, citing Báo Tài nguyên & Môi trường in 2018, gives a herd of about 45,000 cattle at Nghĩa Đàn, and, citing the broadcaster VTV in December 2021, a share of about 45 per cent of Vietnam’s liquid-milk segment.

Vietnam’s food and drink brands.

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.

True Happiness, in capitals and lower case.

TH true MILK belongs to TH Group, which describes itself as making fresh milk, nut milk, fruit and vegetables, herbal drinks, bottled water and juice. Thái Hương is named on the company website as founder and chair of the group’s strategy council. Its founder page quotes a speech she gave at the Global Summit of Women in Tokyo in May 2017, in which she described entering a market of “nearly 500 labels” and choosing to position the brand as “True Happiness.”

Recognition has come mostly from national and trade awards. The company says the TH brand was named a Vietnam National Brand in three rounds between 2014 and 2018 and again in 2020, and that its products won awards at the Gulfood show in Dubai in 2016 and at the WorldFood show in Moscow. It also says the Asia Book of Records certified its Nghệ An farms in 2015 as Asia’s largest concentrated hi-tech dairy-farm cluster. Thái Hương was named to Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list in 2015 and 2016 and to its 50 Over 50 Asia list in 2022, Vietnamese Wikipedia says, and received the title Hero of Labour from the Vietnamese state in 2020.

The company publishes no logo history, brand typeface or colour codes in the sources checked, so the design story here is the name itself: two capitals, a lower-case “true” and a product word in capitals, used as a system across milk, yogurt, nut milk, water and shops.

For a design guide, TH true MILK shows how a single naming pattern can stretch from one product to a whole family. Compare Vinamilk, Vietnam’s other large dairy brand, and Trung Nguyên, a Vietnamese coffee brand. For this guide we use a dairy blue, pasture green and milk white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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