A workshop that turns rice straw once burned in the fields into solid firelighters and sends them to the US and Canada via Amazon is in Thanh Hoa Province in north-central Vietnam. A video report distributed on September 25, 2026 by Nong nghiep va Moi truong, the house organ of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, conveyed it. From 20 to 22 kg of straw per roll come 50 to 60 boxes of firelighters, and the production scale reached about 7,000 units a month at one point. The order of magnitude is still small. Even so, what Japanese food-ingredient buyers can take home from this is a real example of the question we each stumble over in negotiations with production areas. Where are the by-products from the fields we buy from being sold right now?
Straw that was being burned went to North American BBQ shelves
The report features Nguyen Xuan Tai, from Dang Ne 1 village, Quy Loc commune, Thanh Hoa Province. In 2018 he began research on firelighters made from straw, and arrived at a small solid firestarter by processing, compressing, and molding post-harvest straw. It catches fire quickly and keeps burning for a set time. Uses are places that need outdoor fire, such as starting a stove fire, lighting BBQ charcoal, and campfires.
Dry the straw, crush it, mix it with wax, and mold it
The process is written concretely in the report. First, in pre-treatment, the straw is brought to an appropriate dryness, finely crushed, blended with candle wax (sap nen), and put into molds to be formed. After that it is cut into a usable size by machine, packaged, and shipped. Existing firelighters made from wood are described as having a different raw material, and the markets it targets are cited as Northern Europe and North America.
"7,000 units a month" is a scale reached in the past, not the current monthly output
Here is a decisive difference for the procurement side. The original text writes "reached a production scale of about 7,000 units a month at a certain period," and does not state that 7,000 units come out continuously every month. Treating a reached record and a normal supply volume as the same number throws off your estimate from the start. For the figures of a small-scale operator in a production area, you always want to confirm on the spot whether it is a peak or a continuous level.
The "first" in the original is an internal matter, not written as a market first
This kind of report changes the facts if you read it a notch too high.
The 80% five-star figure is the operator's statement, not shown as Amazon's tally
The figure "about 80% are five stars" comes out as a statement from the operator, who has continued selling. It is not drawn from the platform's tally screen, and neither the covered period nor the number of cases is shown. The phrasing "a firelighter made from straw is a first for us" also cannot be rephrased as an industry first or a world first. It is written that he received multiple domestic and international creative-category awards, but the names of the awards are not given.
The government's support went only as far as a statement of policy on land and raw-material areas
The report also includes an explanation from the local government side. Since Quy Loc commune is an agricultural commune, in line with its startup-support policy it attends to land and trademark protection and seeks to spread sales not only to export but to the domestic market. For its part, the workshop cites support for production land and raw-material areas as a condition for scaling up. It is not at the stage where land has been secured or a subsidy decided.
How many tonnes of straw make 7,000 units a month? Dividing with the original's figures alone
To see the supply capacity, we do the arithmetic using only the figures in the report. The following estimate column is not an announced value but this article's calculation, and a premise enters into how the units are read.
| Item | As stated in the report | This article's estimate |
|---|---|---|
| Weight of one roll of straw | About 20 to 22 kg | — |
| Number of boxes from one roll | About 50 to 60 boxes | — |
| Monthly production scale | About 7,000 units at a certain period | Read by boxes, about 117 to 140 rolls a month |
| Straw consumption per month | Not stated | About 2.3 to 3.1 tonnes by the above conversion |
| Annualized straw consumption | Not stated | About 28 to 37 tonnes |
There is one premise. Whether the original's "7,000 san pham (products)" is the same unit as "hop (box)" cannot be determined from the report. These are figures read taking a box as one unit; if a single piece inside is counted as one unit, straw consumption becomes even smaller.
The north's winter crop is about 940,000 ha; it does not become a story of insufficient raw material
According to the General Statistics Office of Vietnam's monthly report, as of August 20, 2026, the national planting of the winter-crop rice (lua mua) was 1,312,500 ha, of which the north was 938,500 ha, down 38,200 ha from the same period a year earlier. The summer-autumn crop is 1.87 million ha nationwide. Onto a rice-farming area of about 940,000 ha in the north alone, where Thanh Hoa Province belongs, rides a straw consumption of around 30 tonnes a year. It is not at a stage where the volume of raw material becomes the constraint; what gets stuck is on the side of the labor to gather and to dry.
If you set a price for straw, first decide whether it is field-gate or collection-yard delivery
No price appears in this report. Even so, if you enter negotiations over a by-product, the first thing to decide is the transaction stage. Is it field-gate delivery, picking up rolls stacked in the field; collection-yard delivery, after carrying them to a collection yard; or processing-plant delivery? Straw is large in volume relative to weight, and the freight ratio shifts with just one change of stage. If you build a story of "it sells for X times more" by lining up figures from different stages, the factory's profit-and-loss calculation will not add up later.
What Japanese ingredient buyers can draw from this workshop
It is hard to imagine a scene in which a Japanese food company buys the firelighter itself. What can be drawn is elsewhere.
Go to production-area negotiations with one sheet showing an outlet for by-products
Talk about production areas and raw materials in Vietnam, and almost always "what to do with what is left over" comes up. Rice husks, rice bran, fruit skins, shells, stems. Since what you buy is only the edible part, the handling of the rest remains as the counterpart's burden. Whether you can bring one concrete example here changes the air of price negotiation. For rice by-products, there is a story that a new China-originating sea route into Can Tho port loads 80 containers' worth of rice bran on the return leg, and the case of rice bran moving as a container-unit commodity and the case of straw moving as a monthly-few-tonnes handicraft differ by two orders of magnitude. Even for the same "by-product," you want to pick the outlet you present to the counterpart by the order of magnitude of volume.
Without a ledger of origin, a by-product does not become something to sell
If this workshop aims at Northern Europe and North America, a scene will eventually come where it must explain which field the straw came from. Looking at the move in Son La Province to sort out 36,000 ha of coffee and build a ledger by December 30, one can see that the production-area side is starting to create records on a per-plot basis. By-products tend to be left outside the ledger, and that becomes a weakness later. Even as the ordering side from Japan, just putting one line on the origin of by-products into the first specification sheet lightens the confirmation work years later.
At your next production-area visit, ask "where does the straw go?"
The judgment of whether to see a low-volume product as a Japanese raw material has come up in the same form before. As with the time we examined whether floating rice at 2 tonnes per yield could become a Japanese raw material, for small-magnitude items the quick approach is to use them not as a raw material but as an indicator for gauging the production area's situation.
What could be confirmed, and the numbers that could not be obtained
| Item | What can be learned at present | Where it was confirmed |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Nguyen Xuan Tai (Dang Ne 1 village, Quy Loc commune, Thanh Hoa Province) | The originating video report |
| Year started | Began research in 2018 | Same as above |
| Raw material and process | Dry and crush rice straw, blend with wax, then mold, cut, and package | Same as above |
| Sales channels | To the US and Canada via Amazon. Target markets are Northern Europe and North America | Same as above |
| Sale price / unit price | Unconfirmed | Not covered in the report |
| Names of the awards | Unconfirmed (only a statement of multiple, domestic and international) | Same as above |
| The north's winter-crop planting | 938,500 ha as of August 20, 2026 | General Statistics Office of Vietnam, monthly report |
If you did the same thing in Japan, you would get stuck at collection and drying
In Japan too, rice straw, apart from the portion that goes to compost or livestock bedding, remains a challenge to dispose of. But there is a limit to the volume that can be handled by hand, and at a scale of a few tonnes a month, the collection of rolls and securing drying space become the ceiling first. If it gets wet with rain, drying costs jump, and if there is not enough storage space, the only choice is to lower the collection volume. The reason this workshop asks the government for land and raw-material areas is that this is what bites.
If you narrow to one thing to try at your next production-area visit, it is to ask the counterpart where the post-harvest straw and husks go, and to record, with the transaction stage attached, to whom and at what price they are now handed. If you write down whether it is field-gate or collection-yard delivery, that one line becomes the starting point of an estimate when a plan to incorporate by-products into your own processed goods comes up.
