Hanoi (VNA) – Italian coffee producers highly evaluated Vietnamese coffee beans as they are essential ingredients of their products, Mario Vicentini from Comunicaffe International, an Italian daily newspaper about coffee, told Vietnam News Agency reporters at Milano Coffee Festival.
Vietnamese Robusta coffee beans are of high quality that meets strict requirements of Italian coffee producers, he said, noting that Italian producers import raw coffee from Vietnam for the production of coffee products which will be supplied to both Italian and foreign markets. Italy has more than 1,000 coffee factories and all of them have known about Vietnamese coffee.
Federico Colombo, an Italian businessperson operating in the field of import-export, sharing the view, saying that high-quality Robusta coffee from Vietnam is very popular in the Italian market.
The Milano Coffee Festival is being held in Italy from May 19 – 21, gathering the world’s leading coffee makers, including Vietnam.
Visitors to the festival are not only able to have a taste of the world’s most popular coffee products from many countries but also get to know the processes to produce and make coffee of different cultures. This year, Vietnam brings to the festival Robusta and Arabica raw coffee beans and several Vietnamese processed coffee products.
According to Nguyen Duc Thanh, Trade Counsellor of the Embassy of Vietnam in Italy, Vietnam exported 3.2 billion USD worth of coffee in 2017, an increase of 34 percent from a year earlier. The country has remained the world’s second largest coffee producer for years, behind Brazil.
Italy is the country’s third biggest buyers, just behind the United States and Germany. Last year, Italy purchased 274 million USD worth of coffee from Vietnam, up 30 percent year on year and accounting for 8.5 percent of Vietnam’s total exports.
Vietnam plans to step up coffee marketing in 2018 and the following years to ship more raw and processed coffee to Italy.-VNA
VNA