Vietnamese Police Seize Tons of Fake Coffee Made From Soybeans and Corn

When Vietnamese police pulled over a truck carrying 1,056 undocumented bags of ground coffee in Lam Dong province late last month, they expected a paperwork violation. What they found instead was a warehouse operation that had been passing off soybeans and flavorings as real coffee — and it turned out to be just one node in a much larger network.

The raids that followed, spanning from Vietnam’s Central Highlands to the Mekong Delta, have exposed an industrial-scale counterfeit coffee problem. Authorities seized more than seven tons of fake products and raw materials in Lam Dong alone, and then dismantled two more operations in An Giang province that had been running for years.

The Lam Dong Raid

The Ministry of Public Security launched a criminal investigation after that initial truck stop led officers to a warehouse in Bac Gia Nghia Ward run by Luong Viet Kiem. Inside, they found 4.1 tons of fake coffee products and 3 tons of raw materials. Kiem confessed to mixing soybeans and flavorings with small amounts of genuine coffee beans, then grinding the blend and selling it as the real thing.

The math makes the motive obvious. Farmers in the Central Highlands sell authentic coffee beans at roughly $3.86 per kilogram — about three times the price of soybeans. Swap the bulk of your product for the cheaper substitute, add some flavoring to mask the difference, and the margins are enormous.

“Fake coffee products are not rare,” said Nguyen Quang Tho, a coffee trader from neighboring Dak Lak province. “They can be made from soybean or corn, or even both. But who knows if it’s safe for the health to drink these fake coffee products.”

An Giang: Years of Undetected Fraud

Two weeks later, authorities in An Giang province — roughly 500 kilometers south in the Mekong Delta — dismantled two more operations that make the Lam Dong warehouse look modest.

Do Van Quy, a 41-year-old operating under the brand name “Van Quy 7777,” had been registered as a coffee processor since 2016. His supplier, 56-year-old Tran Kim Chen, ran a roasting facility in Tan Chau with a separate warehouse in Long Phu Ward. Chen had been operating for approximately five years.

The scale of their operation was staggering. Police seized 3.1 tons of partially roasted corn and soybean mixture with additives, 800 kilograms of corn and soybeans mid-roast, 158 kilograms of packaged fake ground coffee, 600 kilograms of sodium cyclamate sweetener, more than 1.2 tons of caramel coloring, and roughly 30 tons of unprocessed corn and soybeans waiting to be turned into “coffee.”

Chen sold raw materials to Quy at 15 million Vietnamese dong per ton for corn and 45 million dong per ton for soybeans. Quy processed and sold the finished product to distributors at 50,000 to 60,000 dong per kilogram. Retailers then moved it at 80,000 to 100,000 dong per kilo. Quy admitted to selling approximately 10 tons of counterfeit coffee.

Testing confirmed the obvious: the products contained zero caffeine.

Not a New Problem

Vietnam is the world’s largest Robusta coffee producer, exporting 1.6 million tons valued at $8.9 billion in 2025. The Central Highlands is the heart of that production. But coffee fraud in the region has a grim track record. In 2018, authorities arrested five people in the same area for using battery chemicals to dye waste coffee beans and sell them as black pepper.

The current cases are different in character — soybeans and corn are at least edible — but they point to the same underlying incentive. When a commodity’s price rises significantly, adulteration follows. With coffee prices hitting multi-year highs throughout 2025 and into 2026, the gap between authentic and substitute ingredients makes fraud increasingly profitable.

Why This Matters

For specialty coffee drinkers buying single-origin beans from known roasters, the risk of getting soybean powder in your bag is effectively zero. These operations target domestic ground coffee markets where products are pre-ground, pre-packaged, and sold on price.

But the broader pattern matters. Coffee adulteration erodes consumer trust, undercuts legitimate producers who compete on quality, and raises real health questions — sodium cyclamate, the sweetener found in bulk at one facility, is banned as a food additive in several countries including the United States. When fraudsters operate openly for years before detection, as the An Giang cases show, it suggests enforcement gaps that affect the entire market.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security has opened criminal investigations into all three operations. For the farmers in the Central Highlands growing actual coffee and selling it at $3.86 a kilo, the crackdowns can’t come soon enough.