Trung Nguyên Legend breaks ground on major coffee factory in Vietnam's coffee capital

Trung Nguyên Legend doubled down on Buôn Ma Thut on June 25, breaking ground on a factory system and a 2.5-hectare expansion in Tan An industrial cluster aimed at deeper processing of local robusta. The move is less about adding floor space than about controlling more of the coffee chain in the city most closely tied to Vietnam’s coffee identity.

The project is the latest phase in a longer buildout. Dak Lak provincial coverage says Trung Nguyên Legend had already broken ground on what it described as Southeast Asia’s largest coffee plant on March 10, 2025, at Tan An 2 Industrial Cluster during the 9th Buôn Ma Thut Coffee Festival. The company traces its own origin to June 16, 1996, when Đng Lê Nguyên Vũ started Trung Nguyên in Buôn Ma Thut from a 2.8-square-meter roasting workshop.

The scale of the local coffee base shows why the company is investing there. The USDA Foreign Agricultural Service says the Central Highlands, which includes Đk Lk, accounts for 92 percent of Vietnam’s coffee cultivation area and 90 percent of national output. Provincial figures put Đk Lk at 212,000 hectares of coffee and more than 520,000 tonnes of annual production, with an ecosystem that includes more than 200 processing facilities and hundreds of thousands of farming households.

That raw volume is increasingly being chased by higher-value processing. Vietnam exported about 1.23 million tonnes of coffee worth around US$7 billion in the first nine months of 2025, a jump that reflects a market leaning harder into value rather than volume alone. For producers and roasters, the pressure is no longer just to move beans out of the country, but to keep more of the margin in Vietnam through instant coffee, specialty processing and other deep-processing lines.

The branding layer matters just as much as the machinery. In April 2026, Buôn Ma Thut hosted the World Coffee Heritage Forum with the Đk Lk People’s Committee, UNESCO, Ho Chi Minh City University of Culture and Trung Nguyên Legend, reinforcing the city’s push to frame coffee as living heritage, not just a commodity. Đk Lk’s coffee cultivation and processing knowledge was also placed on Vietnam’s National Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2025.

That is the bigger read on this ground-breaking: Trung Nguyên Legend is not simply expanding in the coffee capital, it is building a physical claim to premium Vietnamese coffee there. The company started with a tiny roasting workshop in 1996, and this new phase keeps pulling the business back to the same city, only now with a much larger shot at shaping how Vietnam’s coffee is processed, priced and presented to the world.