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Tet bonanza expected for Vietnamese products
Locally-made food products, especially confectionery, are expected to enjoy a resurgence in popularity in the leadup to Tet (Lunar New Year) after improvements in food safety and quality.
Duong Thi Quynh Trang, public relations director for the Big C Supermarket chain, said her company had finished stocking around VND120 billion (US$6.8 million) of products for Tet, with most items, such as cookies, candies and dried fruit, produced locally.
Of the 50,000 products being sold in Big C supermarkets, 95 percent were made in Vietnam and given the best positions in the stores, Trang said.
Foreign retailers Metro and Lotte Mart also said local products accounted for 85 to 90 percent of Tet goods at their supermarkets.
Thanh Thuy of Metro said as demand for food items before Tet, the biggest shopping season of the year, often increased by four times, the chain had ordered a large amount of goods from local producers.
Analysts said with many confectionery producers improving both production and marketing techniques over the past three years, they had been able to win the trust of local consumers.
This year’s Tet was a chance for them to achieve better positions in the local market, especially when consumers are still wary of dairy products from China, one of Vietnam’s major confectionery suppliers after several products were found to be contaminated with melamine in September last year.
Melamine, a chemical used to make plastic, makes milk appear rich in protein. Some Chinese producers were caught adding melamine to milk products last year, a practice that led to the deaths of at least six infants in China and sickened thousands more.
Consumers used to favor Chinese products because they were cheaper than Vietnamese-made goods. But now shoppers were weighing up the price of goods against quality and safety, supermarket managers said.
Nguyen Phuong Thao, director of Maximark Cong Hoa Supermarket, said selling local goods had many advantages. For instance, it would help stimulate domestic production and retailers could also negotiate prices with producers in order to keep retail prices low, she said.
Prices of food products for Tet at the supermarket would not increase, she said. Instead, prices could even drop by 5-10 percent because of successful price negotiations with producers, Thao said.
As well as supermarkets, many other retailers also said they were favoring domestic products this year.
Nguyen Thanh Son, owner of a confectionery shop in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 6, said sales of locally-produced candies and cookies have risen at his shop and other shops on Le Quang Sung Street over the past few days.
Sung said he had to order more goods from producers because the demand for confectionery was expected to surge in the days just before Tet.
Kinh Do Corporation, a leading confectionery producer in Vietnam, said its output had increased to about 25 million cookie and candy tins, 15 percent higher than Tet last year.
The company said it has also introduced two new high-end brands made from imported materials in a bid to increase its market share in the luxury segment, which has long been dominated by products from Europe.
Although many consumers have tightened their belts because of the worsening global economy, analysts are expecting a high demand for food products, especially confectionery, during Tet.
vna
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