In Ea Sup, Dak Lak Province in Vietnam's Central Highlands, on poor sandy soil that whitens and dries in the dry season, a woman farmer, Nguyen Thi Bich, earns VND 3.6 billion a year (3.6 billion dong, about 20.9 million yen at about 58 yen per 10,000 dong) from 2 hectares of guava and pomelo. What deserves attention is not the amount itself but its substance. Rather than simply putting fresh fruit on the market, she turns leaves into tea, fruit into liquor and essential oil, and pomelo into jam. A vertical integration that completes "grow, process, and sell" within a single farm has lifted a small farmer on poor land this far. For Japanese food buyers and raw-material procurement staff, it is worth reading as a concrete example of a Vietnamese production area beginning to move beyond fresh produce.
A "grow and sell" farm born from white sandy soil
Bich's farm, reported by the local paper Dan Viet, totals 2,050 trees: 1,550 ruby guava and 500 green pomelo. She began cultivation in 2019, and revenue started coming in earnest in 2025. Because the soil is poor sand, she went all in on organic cultivation combining cow and chicken manure with homemade organic matter. What is interesting is the fertilizer's raw material: she returns to the field the pressed residue and by-products from distilling liquor, extracting essential oil, and syrup processing. In effect she runs within the farm a cycle in which processing residue becomes the nutrients for the next planting.
For a farmer who sells only fruit, a bumper crop is the flip side of a price collapse. Bich avoids that by turning everything — fruit, leaves, and by-products — into products. Switching to organic drops the yield to 60–70% of conventional cultivation, but the design makes up for it with unit price and processing value added.
The sales breakdown shows "how processing works"
Lining up the VND 3.6 billion annual revenue by item reveals where the vertical integration takes effect. The following is organized from Dan Viet's reported figures.
| Items | Volume (per year) | Guide unit price | Guide revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresh guava | About 80 tonnes | About 30,000 dong/kg | About VND 2.4 billion |
| Guava-leaf tea (Tra Briet Organic) | About 6,000 boxes | — | About VND 0.66 billion |
| Green pomelo | About 25 tonnes | 20,000–25,000 dong/kg | About VND 0.55 billion |
| Ruby guava liquor | About 1,200 bottles | — | About VND 72 million |
The pillar of sales is still fresh guava (about VND 2.4 billion), but what deserves attention is the presence of processed goods. Leaf tea alone, at about VND 0.66 billion, exceeds the fresh pomelo sales (about VND 0.55 billion). Leaves that would normally be thrown away in the field have become a revenue source rivaling fresh fruit. Adding essential oil and jam here, the farm has grown to the scale of employing five local workers at 6–8 million dong a month. For this effort, Bich has even been named a candidate for the title of "Scientist of the Farmers (Nha khoa hoc cua Nha nong)."
Why Japanese procurement staff should read this
Vietnamese fruit has carried a distortion where, in a bumper year, the production-area price falls to rock bottom while it sells at several times that at the storefront. As long as they buy fresh, Japanese buyers take on this price volatility and freshness risk as is. In fact, the structure of Vietnamese fruit shifting from a fresh-produce bias to processing has begun to show in the first-half fresh-produce exports overall too. What Bich's farm shows is the fact that this shift is happening not only at the level of provincial policy and big companies but at the level of a 2-hectare individual farmer.
A production area that is integrated through to processing is easy for the Japanese side to handle. Processed goods such as tea, liquor, jam, and essential oil can be distributed at room temperature, have a long shelf life, and ride easily on lot-based orders. There is none of the pressure of fresh produce, where "this week's harvest must be moved at once." From an OEM and raw-material procurement standpoint, such a farm can be combined as a supply source of semi-finished goods — "leaf-tea raw material," "juice base," "essential-oil material" — rather than "fruit." In the same Dak Lak Province, the launch of a fruit-processing cluster is also underway, and if individual farmers' processing know-how meshes with provincial-level consolidation, it moves a step closer to stable supply for Japan.
The distance to a production area that sells even the "story"
What sets Bich's farm apart from mere efficiency of processing is that the background itself — poor land, organic, circular — becomes product value. It overlaps with the trend of Vietnamese producers beginning to sell the material as a story In Japan's gift market and natural-and-health-oriented sales floors, the background of "tea from a farm that tilled rough sandy soil organically and left no part to waste" becomes differentiation on the shelf as is. In creating a realm not compared on price alone, the production area's story is a factor that cannot be ignored.
On the other hand, challenges unique to an individual farm remain. Eighty tonnes of guava a year is a small lot seen from Japan's commercial flow, and the quality specification and certification of processed goods and year-round supply stability are challenges yet to come. How to align the certification backing the organic claim with international standards, and how to turn over inventory in periods outside the harvest season. Whether these points can be worked out is the dividing line between an "interesting farm" and "a trading partner Japan can work with."
An image of a production area where small vertical integrations build up
Rather than consume Bich's case as a one-off success story, we want to see it as a specimen of what is beginning to happen in Vietnamese production areas. From a production area that puts out fresh fruit cheaply in bulk to a production area that holds processing and takes value added for itself. That move is advancing simultaneously in both the province's large cluster and the 2-hectare individual farmer. What the Japanese procurement side can do is not only track the fresh-produce market but find such processing-type farms and production-area clusters early and build relationships on a semi-finished-goods and raw-material basis. On your next visit to a production area, confirm not just "what they harvest" but "what they turn the harvest into." There lies a thread to procurement not tossed about by price volatility.
