#71 - Nguyen Coffee Supply, the Disruptor

Shoes Off Inside with MKT (fka The May Lee Show)

Who doesn’t love coffee? It’s a beloved beverage worldwide, but if you ask coffee lovers who are the biggest producers of coffee beans, most would likely answer “Brazil” or “Columbia”. You’d be hard pressed to get anyone to answer “Vietnam” and yet, the southeast Asian country is the second biggest producer of coffee in the world, but because of false narratives and stereotypes, Vietnamese coffee has been dismissed as inferior. Sahra Nguyen, a Vietnamese American entrepreneur, set out to change that ill-conceived story by starting Nguyen Coffee Supply, from the ground up. She disrupted the conventional coffee industry monopolized by Arabica beans by introducing the world to the beauty of Robusta beans and, at the same time, began the fight against the invisibilization of Asian culture, food and people. The treatment of Vietnamese coffee is a metaphor for how Asians have been treated for centuries.