How Nguyen Coffee Supply is Opening Minds and Palates

In the heart of Brooklyn, a remarkable story is brewing—the story of Vietnamese American Sahra Nguyen, the founder of Nguyen Coffee Supply. The Vietnamese specialty coffee company first began as a direct trade company started in Nguyen’s Brooklyn apartment. Now, their products are sold on the shelves of Whole Foods across the country. The driving force behind Nguyen's mission is a profound sense of inequity pervading the global coffee industry, specifically surrounding Vietnamese coffee.

“I felt like there was a deep injustice happening in the coffee industry globally, where segments of the coffee community were completely rendered invisible,” Nguyen shares. Despite its significant contribution to the global coffee supply chain and accounting for approximately 10 percent of Vietnam's agricultural exports, the Vietnamese coffee industry has historically suffered from a lack of recognition and respect.

Central to Nguyen Coffee Supply's vision is the robusta coffee bean, which is in contrast to the more commonly encountered arabica bean, which is the bean you’ll see most commonly available on shelves at the grocery stores and roasted and ground to be served to you in cafes across the United States. To the average consumer, the difference between the two beans is likely only slightly obvious in taste. The arabica is a bit more acidic and sweeter, with flavor notes that people generally compare to fruits and berries. The robusta is bolder and more bitter, reminiscent of chocolate or nuts, and goes well with a splash of milk. It’s a personal choice, but robusta deserves to be within the conversation to give consumers a wider variety of options.

Though Nguyen Coffee Supply does also supply and roast arabica beans, there’s a huge focus on the alternative, the robusta, which is a more resilient and bolder-in-taste alternative. Robusta beans are native to sub-Saharan Africa and have the ability to be grown in wider varieties of climates, especially hotter and more humid areas, making it much easier to farm and cultivate. This makes them a more climate-conscious option as well. “Robusta as a coffee species was super invisible in the U.S. market, but even worse, it was explicitly frowned upon,” Nguyen explains. Nguyen Coffee Supply is ultimately challenging the biases and stereotypes associated with this remarkable coffee variety. Nguyen believes that the disdain for the bean may be rooted in xenophobia.

Nguyen Coffee Supply is ultimately challenging the biases and stereotypes associated with this remarkable coffee variety. Nguyen believes that the disdain for the bean may be rooted in xenophobia.

Generally, the palette is the first to disagree with a robusta bean roasted coffee—it’s slightly more bitter, it doesn’t have the sweetness that an arabica bean does, but that’s because it’s just different. It provides a variety for the consumer and in a market that’s saturated with arabica beans, the robusta has not had a chance to thrive. “Part of this is because the gatekeepers of the coffee industry have a vested interest in keeping robusta down,” shares Nguyen in an op-ed she wrote previously. “It’s likely that you’ve had coffee made with robusta beans before, but didn’t know it. It’s often used for instant coffee or included in espresso blends without being labeled.” This keeps robusta beans from being invested in and constantly fed into the lower quality coffee market without being labeled, making it nearly invisible to the average consumer.

“I got a little nervous [at the beginning] because everything I read about robusta on the Internet was terrible,” she explains about the beginning days of her company. She was nervous, but never scared, and saw a huge opportunity. She found it odd that there was such a stark divide amongst consumers between the robusta bean and the arabica bean. “I've never seen any other industry talk about a product in this framework. I don't see people talking about lemon and limes like this, or red grapes and green grapes, or red wine and white wine.” She was aware of the industry’s dominant perspective and that it would be difficult to enter the industry wanting to share the robusta. A big part of the mission of the company is to divest from the global misconception that sees the robusta bean as a cheaper, or lower-quality bean, alternative to the arabica.

“Nobody associates Vietnam with coffee,” she shares, of course we’re talking about the sweet delicacy that is a classic Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk. “But in Vietnam, coffee is a lifestyle,” she shares, in the sense that it’s a beverage that’s consumed almost 24/7, almost akin to water. If you spend any time on the bustling streets of Hanoi, you’ll find 10 coffee shops lined along the same street and there’s no shortage of consumers. The huge coffee drinking culture in Vietnam came to be from French colonization in the mid-1800s. When the French colonized Vietnam, they brought over coffee beans, which became integrated into the Vietnamese consciousness over time and has grown into its own subculture over the decades.

Across the United States, as more mom-and-pop Asian restaurants and cafes joined the food scene, Vietnamese coffee began to become a staple across menus everywhere. “You could get Vietnamese coffee on all those menus, but they were all using Cafe Du Monde which isn't a Vietnamese coffee brand,” Nguyen shares, noting that there weren’t any Vietnamese brands supplying coffee to the market and Cafe Du Monde is not transparent about where their beans are sourced from. Cafe Du Monde has the same flavor notes that most coffee sourced from Vietnam has—it’s mixed with chicory root so it has a nuttier, bolder flavor, much like what you'd find out of Vietnamese robusta beans. Around 2016, she noticed that the coffee shops she was working in within New York City began shifting to have Vietnamese iced coffee on their menus.

There’s a lot of personal preferences, but Nguyen shares that the coffee experience is all about slowing down. Coffee is its own moment, not accompanied with breakfast, in her mind.

What exactly does a cup of “Vietnamese coffee” look like? There’s a lot of personal preferences, but Nguyen shares that the coffee experience is all about slowing down. Coffee is its own moment, not accompanied with breakfast, in her mind. A big part of slowing down is the phin filter, which is a staple amongst many Vietnamese households. Before espresso machines, the steel contraption was how most people made their coffee. Hot water drains through layers of the steel filter and coffee ground, which is used to brew a strong and bold drip coffee. It just requires a bit of patience, the slow drip ensures a satisfying cup with a stronger flavor profile, which is perfect to wake you up in the morning. Her perfect cup includes some whole milk and a little of condensed milk stirred in for a touch of sweetness.

Nguyen Coffee Supply's mission extends far beyond introducing exceptional coffee beans to the American market. They strive to reshape the conversation around coffee. “We're ready to be visible in the conversation, particularly in this third wave, especially in an era where there was such an emphasis on transparency,” Nguyen says. But this wave of transparency about where beans are being sourced from, whether it’s sustainable or not, and how they are being processed also raises a bigger question, one that Nguyen asks explicitly as she notices the injustices faced by Vietnamese coffee cultivators: “Who is deserving of those values of transparency and care?”

“Coffee has been completely colonized,” she explains. “We don’t have one global coffee brand that is single-origin.” Large coffee companies like Starbucks and Dunkin can source from more than 25 different countries and thousands of different regions, which in her opinion, is bastardizing the coffee cultivation practices.

Nguyen spent her young adult life in grassroots organizing, from being involved on campus at UCLA, where she majored in Asian American studies, to helping launch NBC Asian America and producing and directing documentaries for NBC News. Advocating for marginalized communities has always been a throughline in her life, and Nguyen Coffee Supply is simply an extension of that advocacy.  “We're going to continue to support our mission of truly building an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable coffee community worldwide.”