How a US$1,600 coffee stall in Saigon became Vietnam’s most instructive case study in sustainable branding

On an April morning in 2025, the queue outside 1A Sương Nguyệt Anh street in central Ho Chi Minh City stretched down the block and held for over an hour in the Saigon heat. The people in it, from students in white áo dài to parents with children to tourists holding phones aloft, were not waiting for a sneaker drop. They were waiting for coffee served in a tube of green bamboo, capped with wax paper and carried by a hand-woven palm-leaf loop: a limited holiday edition that had, overnight, become the object everyone in the city seemed to want to hold.

That week, daily sales at the shop (called, with disarming plainness, cà phê ống, “tube coffee”) jumped from around 80 cups to 600–700. The morning stock sold out before the heat of the day arrived. Many customers never drank from their tubes at all; they carried them home intact, asked staff not to remove a single sticker, and set them on shelves like keepsakes.

“If it were just the coffee, nobody would wait more than an hour in that weather,” says Nguyễn Huỳnh, the shop’s 29-year-old founder, who serves customers in an áo dài every day. “What people took home was an emotion: a memory, kept in a very personal way. That is the most meaningful thing a brand can do: not just sell a product, but help people hold on to a beautiful moment.”

It would be easy to file cà phê ống away as another Asian street-food fad: TikTok finds a photogenic object, crowds follow, the algorithm moves on. Vietnamese social media said as much when the shop first went viral: sớm nở tối tàn, “blooms in the morning, dies by night,” one commenter predicted. Three years on, the prediction has aged badly. And inside this tiny shop, three of the bigger questions facing Asia’s consumer economy are being answered at the scale of a single bamboo tube: what to do about single-use plastic, how to make heritage feel alive for a generation raised on feeds, and whether a small business can grow without dissolving into a franchise.

^{Special-edition cà phê ống bamboo tubes. Photo: Courtesy of cà phê ống.}

The architect who never changed careers

Huỳnh resists the tidy narrative of the architect who quit. “I never thought of myself as having ‘left’ architecture,” he says. “Architecture taught me to look at things from the root: a beautiful building isn’t about form; it has to solve a problem and be durable enough to live alongside time.” After architecture school he moved into branding and marketing, working with companies across industries, including food and beverage. “If architecture taught me to design space, branding taught me how a brand creates experience and emotion for people. With cà phê ống, I simply connected what I had learned.”

The founding moment came, as the Vietnamese press has often retold, on a trip to Đà Lạt, but Huỳnh’s own version is more tender than the legend. The tube of coffee he was handed there was crude: a length of bamboo cut straight from the tree, cleaned, filled. “No design, no refinement at all. But that plainness is exactly what I remembered. The coolness of fresh bamboo in the hand, the faint natural scent mixing with the coffee. It felt like drinking coffee in the middle of nature.”

He thought of camping trips with friends, deep in the forest, where bamboo had been kettle, bowl and cup, and where every tube eventually returned to the earth it came from. Bamboo had lived beside Vietnamese people for centuries, he realised. And yet, somewhere along the way to modern life, it had quietly disappeared from daily experience.

What he saw in that rough tube, he says, was not a cup. “I saw a material that could tell a story about Vietnam. But if the bamboo tube stayed in the forest, or in one small shop on a plateau, that story would never travel. I wanted to bring it from the village to the city.”

That meant solving an unglamorous problem: turning a piece of bamboo into a takeaway cup, for cities where takeaway is a way of life. And here the architect took over completely. In architecture school, Huỳnh had absorbed a rule he has never let go of: no detail should exist merely to decorate. Every line, every material must have a reason. Before any element is allowed onto the product, he runs it through three questions. Is it truly necessary? Does it tell another story about Vietnam, or do some good for a community somewhere? Does it make the customer’s experience better? “If a detail cannot answer those three questions,” he says, “I’m ready to let it go.”

The details that survived the test read like a quiet map of the country. The lid is wax paper, chosen for recyclability. The carrying loop is woven from buông palm leaf by artisans in Bến Tre, in the Mekong Delta, a handicraft of the southern river country, pressed gently into daily city life. The straw is bamboo from the OCOP-certified craft village of Thăng Thọ in Thanh Hóa province, each one sanded smooth at both ends so it feels safe against the lips, laser-etched with the shop’s logo, and reusable roughly 300 times. “I didn’t want to just swap a plastic cup for a bamboo one,” Huỳnh says. “I wanted the entire experience to be consistent: close to nature, respectful of Vietnam’s craft villages, creating durable value from local materials.”

Will customers ever notice all of that? He has been asked before, and his answer carries the conviction of his first profession. “Maybe they won’t remember each detail on its own. But they will feel the difference. When every small detail is made with care and points toward the same story, the experience becomes whole. That’s what architecture taught me: a beautiful building is never made by one striking detail, but by many small ones, each placed exactly where it belongs, all serving a single idea.”

“When a customer holds the tube,” he adds, “I hope they know they’re not holding a cup. They’re touching the story of many regions of Vietnam at once: bamboo from Đắk Lắk, palm leaf from Bến Tre, a straw from a craft village in Thanh Hóa, and the hands of all the people who made it.”

^{Founder Nguyễn Huỳnh with a cà phê ống bamboo tube. Photo: Courtesy of cà phê ống.}

The thousand tubes he threw away

Cà phê ống opened in November 2023 with startup capital of about 40 million đồng (roughly US$1,600) in a small space beside the Ông Lãnh bridge in District 4: one counter, seven tables, and a modest dream of perhaps 50 customers a day, each one staying long enough to hear the story.

Within days of soft-opening, the first videos hit social media. Three hundred customers a day arrived at a shop provisioned for fifty. People drove in from the neighbouring provinces of Bình Dương, Đồng Nai, and Vũng Tàu, having watched a video the night before, and some went home empty-handed because the shop had run out of tubes. “Every time that happened, I felt a real ache,” Huỳnh says. “Someone had come all that way, full of excitement, for something I couldn’t give them.”

So he over-corrected, ordering tubes by the thousand. Then came the lesson he has never told the press before now. Three weeks later the viral wave subsided, traffic normalised, and more than 1,000 stockpiled bamboo tubes, which no one on the team yet knew how to store, yellowed past the point of use. He threw them all away.

He does not describe the moment with drama, but with something closer to gratitude. “That taught me the hardest thing isn’t creating a product people notice,” he says. “It’s being prepared enough for the brand to survive being noticed.” The waste sent him into months of trial and error, out of which came the process the shop still runs today: a cleaning, sterilisation and cold-storage regimen that keeps tubes naturally green, food-safe and usable for up to six months. “Looking back, I’m thankful for those early mistakes. If I hadn’t had to throw away a thousand tubes, I would never have built a process good enough for cà phê ống to reach where it is now.”

It is a pattern he has since watched repeat from the other side of the counter. “Nobody warns a small founder that going viral isn’t the destination; it’s the first exam,” he says. “A video can make a brand famous overnight. A brand only survives for years if behind the virality there’s a good enough product, a solid enough process, and a team persistent enough to improve every day. When millions of people suddenly know you, the question is no longer how to become more famous. It’s how to deserve the attention you’ve been given.”

Deliberately slow, up to a point

Each serving at cà phê ống is assembled almost entirely by hand: the tube retrieved from cold storage, inspected, dried, fitted with its paper lid, tied with its leaf handle, finished with its bamboo straw. The coffee itself is brewed in a phin, the slow Vietnamese drip filter, rather than pulled from an espresso machine: a choice of identity over throughput. “Phin coffee is part of the character of Vietnamese coffee culture,” Huỳnh says. “The aroma, the rhythm of each falling drop, the way you wait for it. That’s something I wanted to keep, even in a takeaway model.”

He rejects, though, the romantic framing of slowness for its own sake. “I don’t think we chose slowness. We chose thoroughness (chỉn chu). And that doesn’t mean I accept making customers wait forever.” Three years of quiet refinement have brought assembly down to sixty to ninety seconds per cup, the handwork intact, the waiting tamed. “I believe customers are willing to wait a little longer if what they receive is worth it. But I also have a responsibility not to let that wait become an inconvenience. Care and efficiency aren’t opposites, if you’re patient enough to perfect the details.”

The same unsentimental clarity extends to the most common criticism the shop receives: that the coffee tastes the same as it would from a plastic cup. Huỳnh’s answer is disarming: the customers are right. “A bamboo tube is not a magic trick that makes coffee beans taste better,” he says. “But tasting a coffee was never only about the tongue. If you drink slowly, there’s a faint scent of fresh bamboo woven into the aroma. There’s the coolness of the tube in your palm, the natural green of it, the roughness of something that grew rather than something that was moulded. An experience is built from many senses, and from the story behind the product. We have never claimed to be the shop with the best-tasting coffee. If a customer finishes their drink and remembers the feeling of bamboo in their hand, or begins to think a little differently about what they use once and throw away, then that cup has completed its mission.”

^{Nguyễn Huỳnh, founder of cà phê ống. Photo: Courtesy of cà phê ống.}

The economics of green

Here is the arithmetic that makes cà phê ống more than an aesthetic. In its early days, one bamboo tube cost about 12,000 đồng (against a few hundred đồng for a plastic cup) before counting cold storage, hand assembly, and every eco-material in the package. Rather than hunting for a cheaper material, Huỳnh went upstream: the shop worked directly with farming households in Krông Bông district, Đắk Lắk, to optimise harvesting, processing and transport together. Tube cost today: under 10,000 đồng, at unchanged quality.

He is quick to correct a persistent misreading of his supply chain. The bamboo is not cut from wild forest; it comes from planted, zoned material areas: nứa bamboo, light-bodied, thin-walled, clean-cored, the same variety highland communities use to cook cơm lam rice. Vietnam holds the world’s fourth-largest bamboo reserves, and Huỳnh treats that fact as a strategic one. Fresh consignments arrive from Đắk Lắk roughly every two days.

“Before I started, I thought a supply chain was just where you buy ingredients,” he says. “Working directly with the families in Krông Bông, I realised that behind every tube are many people and many stories. At the beginning we were simply buyer and seller. After three years, it’s a relationship of trust: they help us improve the process, we give them steadier orders. Every tube sold adds income for farming households hundreds of kilometres from this shop. That’s when the money I spend stops feeling like a material cost, and starts feeling like an investment in someone’s livelihood.”

Asked whether that thread between a city storefront and a highland community is fragile or strong, he declines the easy answer: “Both. It’s fragile because if the orders stop, or consumers stop choosing sustainable products, the whole chain feels it immediately. And it’s strong if both sides keep looking in the same direction. Sustainability doesn’t start with anything grand. Sometimes it starts with one small coffee shop deciding to buy responsibly, pay a fair price, and stay long enough.”

The consumer-facing loop closes the circle. Tubes survive five to twenty uses depending on care; customers who bring one back get 10 per cent off their next order; retired tubes become plant pots, pen holders, ornaments. Huỳnh calls it “a very small version” of the deposit-return systems some countries run at national scale, and he is precise about what he thinks other shops should copy. “Copying a bamboo tube is easy. What I hope businesses borrow is the way of seeing a product’s life cycle. Instead of thinking only about selling one more drink, ask where that object goes after the customer finishes, and what value it can still carry. When a business starts designing for the next life of its product instead of only the first use, that’s when it gets close to sustainability.”

Then he says the quiet part out loud, with numbers. Across three years and two branches, in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, cà phê ống has replaced more than 148,000 plastic cups, roughly 3.2 tonnes of single-use waste. Against the billions of plastic items Vietnam consumes each year, he concedes the figure is tiny. “If you say cà phê ống is the answer to Vietnam’s plastic problem, that’s an exaggeration. A small coffee shop cannot solve a problem that size. But a small working prototype of a solution? That, I believe, we are. No single product can change the world, but every product can change a habit. If one small shop inspires ten more, then a hundred more, the combined impact stops being small. Sometimes a big change begins with one person carrying one cup back to one shop.”

Despite premium materials, prices run 38,000–50,000 đồng (US$1.50–2), deliberately within reach. The shop keeps them there by staying small on purpose: a modest storefront instead of a grand space, a lean team, a process trimmed season after season. “Living green should not be a luxury,” Huỳnh says. “If a sustainable choice is only for people of means, it can’t create real change. I hope one day people won’t have to weigh ‘green’ against ‘price’: the environmentally friendly product will simply be the normal choice. That is what we are working toward, every day, a little at a time.”

The áo dài behind the counter

Huỳnh and his roughly twenty staff wear the áo dài every working day, not the ceremonial kind, but one the team redesigned for labour: light, breathable fabric, cut for pouring and carrying and standing through a Saigon afternoon. “An áo dài is only truly beautiful when the person wearing it feels confident and natural,” he says, “not when they’re performing in a traditional costume.”

The daily-ness is the point. “Like many young people, I used to think the áo dài was for special occasions,” he admits. “Wearing it every day to work, I realised it can absolutely be part of modern life, if you’re willing to rethink the fabric, the cut, the way it’s used.” It changed him in ways he didn’t expect. “Each morning when I put it on and stand behind the counter, I remind myself that I’m not just representing a coffee shop. I’m introducing a piece of Vietnamese culture to every guest, especially visitors from abroad. It makes me more careful with every greeting, every smile, the way I tell the story of the tube. I want guests to remember the warmth and kindness of Vietnamese people, not only an unusual cup.”

^{Special-edition cà phê ống beside lotus and áo dài. Photo: Courtesy of cà phê ống.}

What moves him most, he says, is watching the same shift happen in his staff, most of them young, many of whom once found the garment distant or constraining. “After a while, they tell me they no longer feel the áo dài is something strange. They feel proud to wear something that carries Vietnamese identity to work every day.”

The special editions that periodically empty the shop’s shelves, hand-applied stamps and designs marking Tết and other holidays through the year, work on the same principle: not decoration, but storytelling on the same small canvas. Customers return to collect each new release; some ask for their tubes left exactly as made, souvenirs of a day rather than containers for a drink. “Every time a customer comes back, I want them to find a new reason to smile,” Huỳnh says, “and to carry away one more small story about Vietnam.”

His ambition for the foreign tourists in his queue is correspondingly specific: “I don’t need a visitor from Bangkok, Seoul or Paris to remember they drank coffee from a bamboo tube. I hope they understand that Vietnam is a country that treasures its traditions and keeps finding ways to renew them for the present. A cup of coffee can be a very natural ambassador. In fifteen minutes, a guest touches materials from Đắk Lắk, Bến Tre and Thanh Hóa, tastes phin coffee, and meets Vietnamese hospitality. Culture only truly lives when it’s present in daily life: when the áo dài is worn to work, when bamboo is used to drink coffee, when traditional values are used naturally instead of displayed in a museum. Identity isn’t about keeping the past unchanged. It’s the ability of traditional values to keep living in the present, in a new language.”

Copycats, boring Tuesdays, and the discipline of readiness

Imitation arrived on schedule. After each viral wave, bamboo-tube coffee shops sprouted in Biên Hòa, Hanoi and beyond; most, Huỳnh notes without triumph, lasted a few months. His reaction to being copied is close to gratitude. “From the first days, I hoped this idea would spread. Our goal was never just to sell more coffee; it was to change how people see sustainable products. Copying a bamboo tube is easy. Sustaining a brand is something else entirely: the material zone built with farmers in Đắk Lắk, the cold-storage process, food-safety standards, training, three years of failures. Others can make a tube that looks like ours. They can’t copy the story, the people, and the accumulated experience. If shops across Vietnam and Asia one day each find their own sustainable version, I won’t call that competition. I’ll call it the idea’s greatest success.”

Today the shop sells a steady 90–120 tubes a day across its two branches, a fraction of its viral peaks, and precisely the regime Huỳnh says he has been building for. “I’ve already lived that ‘boring Tuesday,’” he says of the inevitable post-trend future. “A brand can’t live forever on one idea. Some things we will always keep: the story of Vietnamese culture, local materials, sustainability. Everything else we’re willing to change: products, experience, technology, how we tell the story. Changing at the right moment is how an identity stays alive in a new context.”

Then he describes, almost fondly, the future the skeptics once wielded as a threat. “If two years from now nobody is filming anymore, I hope it’s a day when the regulars stop by before work, when a traveller stumbles on a very Vietnamese corner of the city, when someone comes back simply because they like the feeling of bamboo in their hand. The real measure of a brand isn’t how many million views it gets. It’s whether, after the attention passes, customers still want to return. If on an ordinary Tuesday, with no cameras, the shop is still lit, still has its regulars, and is still telling new stories about Vietnam, then to me that’s the most sustainable success there is.”

For three years, that discipline expressed itself as refusal. Partnership and franchise offers came in from across Vietnam and from Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the United States; Huỳnh turned them down, repeating that the process had to be “packaged properly” first. What has changed, he says, is not the philosophy but the readiness. “Expanding too early is sometimes more dangerous than expanding slowly. These three years were for testing, failing and standardising everything: the material zone, the cold chain, hygiene standards, training, the customer experience. Today I can say with confidence that cà phê ống is ready. But what I want to expand isn’t stores. It’s a standard. Whether a customer walks into cà phê ống in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, or one day Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore, they should meet the same quality, the same experience, the same story about Vietnam. I don’t want to replicate shops. I want to replicate values.”

The worry underneath, he admits, is personal. “If one store does badly, customers won’t think it’s the fault of a branch. They’ll think it’s cà phê ống. Trust takes years to build and one bad experience to damage. Maybe because I come from architecture, I believe the foundation must be solid before you add a new floor.”

The expansion map remains deliberately unfashionable: Huế and Hội An before malls and airports. “Those aren’t just business locations; they’re windows for introducing Vietnam to the world,” he says. “Every brand needs the right setting for its story to be told in full. If the story is placed in the right place, customers will find it. Chasing footfall while losing the connection between product and place would leave cà phê ống as nothing more than a pretty bamboo cup.”

Pressed on what he would never change, even for ten times the revenue, he lists exactly four things: the story of Vietnam, told through bamboo, the áo dài, phin coffee and craft villages; the commitment to sustainable materials, whatever the cost pressure; a single consistent standard of quality whether there is one store or a hundred; and decency toward the communities at the top of his supply chain. “Revenue can grow over time, but identity: there is only one. Lose revenue, and I can rebuild. Lose the identity, and cà phê ống loses its reason to exist.”

What a three-metre storefront proves

Huỳnh’s advice for a young founder in Jakarta, Chiang Mai or Manila hoping to do “the bamboo tube idea” is, characteristically, a warning against doing the bamboo tube idea. “The first thing I’d say is: don’t copy cà phê ống. Find a material and a story that carry your own country’s identity. In China, brands serve ice cream in bamboo tubes; in Japan, a matcha latte in a bamboo tube recently went viral. Same material, completely different cultural spirit. What matters isn’t copying an idea; it’s telling your homeland’s story in a modern language. Start small, make the product genuinely good, and stay patient with the values you’ve chosen. Asia doesn’t need more identical brands. Asia needs more brands proud enough to tell their own cultural story.”

And what can his three-metre storefront teach the region’s big F&B chains, with their glossy sustainability reports? He declines the premise (“I don’t think a small coffee shop can teach large corporations”), then delivers the lesson anyway. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned in three years, it’s that sustainability has to begin with real actions, not a communications campaign: decisions made every day. Replace the plastic cup. Stay with the craft villages. Listen to customers; so many of our improvements came from their smallest suggestions. Customers won’t remember what a company wrote in a CSR report. They’ll remember what it actually did, and what they felt in each experience. Sustainability isn’t something to narrate. It’s something to practise daily.”

Ten years from now, he hopes cà phê ống is “a brand that created a positive movement”: big enough to be known, sincere enough to inspire other businesses toward their own sustainable answers. Store count, he says, is not the metric. “If in ten years we have only a few stores but customers still love us, we still work with the craft villages, and we’ve made more people fall in love with Vietnamese culture, I’ll be proud. And if we’re lucky enough to grow to hundreds of stores while keeping those values, that would be more wonderful still.”

^{Founder Nguyễn Huỳnh with a cà phê ống bamboo tube. Photo: Courtesy of cà phê ống.}

Asked, finally, for one Vietnamese word he wishes the whole world knew, he doesn’t hesitate: bền vững (sustainable, durable, lasting). “It’s not just a property of bamboo. It’s a spirit: always adapting in order to grow, yet keeping your identity and your roots. I hope the world understands bền vững not only as protecting the environment, but as keeping cultural values alive so they can travel into the future.”

His own daily order, for the record, is a phin sữa, slow-dripped Vietnamese coffee over condensed milk. “A very Saigon flavour,” he says. “The cup I choose to start every working morning.”

cà phê ống, by the numbers

Founded November 2023 at 150/16 Bến Vân Đồn, District 4, HCMC, with ~40 million đồng (~US$1,600) in startup capital. Two branches today: 1A Sương Nguyệt Anh, Bến Thành, HCMC and 29 Ô Đồng Lầm, Văn Miếu, Hanoi. Around 20 staff. Prices 38,000–50,000 đồng. Current volume 90–120 tubes/day; peak (special holiday editions, April 2025) 600–700/day. Tubes reused 5–20 times, then repurposed; bamboo straws reusable ~300 times. Tube cost reduced from ~12,000 to under 10,000 đồng through supply-chain collaboration with farming households in Krông Bông, Đắk Lắk. Total single-use plastic avoided in three years: 148,000+ cups, ≈3.2 tonnes.

Interview conducted in Vietnamese in July 2026 and translated by BriefAsia; answers have been condensed and edited for clarity. Photography courtesy of cà phê ống.