Le Hoang Diep Thao

Le Hoang Diep Thao was born in 1973 in Gia Lai, Vietnam to a family that conducted business in the gold and silver trade from the early 1960s.[5]

After her graduation in 1994, Thao started work at the Gia Lai provincial Post Office for its “108” switchboard information service, where she worked for five years answering phone calls and providing information.[5] Noting that the majority of calls to the service were enquiries about the local coffee industry, she sensed a strong potential for a national coffee business that could be based in the region.[6] She met her future husband Dang Le Nguyen Vu, a medical student with aspirations to start a coffee business, when answering his calls to the service.[7]

As the two became romantically involved, Vu and Thao invested in their first coffee enterprise, based in Long Xuyen, which promptly failed. Thao offered to financially support a new coffee business targeting the major metropolitan area of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) using her family's resources. The pair married in 1998, securing the financial support, and moved to Ho Chi Minh City to begin the new business—which Vu named “Trung Nguyen”.[7]

The first Trung Nguyen coffee shop was opened at 587 Nguyen Kiem, Phu Nhuan District, Ho Chi Minh City in 1998.[8] The venue was an overnight success following a widely publicised campaign to promote the store's opening, involving the serving of free coffee for the first seven days of operation.[6]

Managing Trung Nguyen behind the scenes while her husband served to direct the vision and the public face of the business, Thao oversaw the development of a Trung Nguyen Coffee Shop chain, pioneering the first franchise in Vietnam. Within two years, the Trung Nguyen brand was attached to more than 1000 coffee shops in Vietnam.[9] The influence of the brand and its transmission of the coffee culture of the Vietnamese Central Highlands throughout Saigon (and later Hanoi) is popularly believed to be responsible for launching a “third wave” of coffee within the country, popularising the drinking of coffee at coffee shops as an affordable leisure pastime for all, and permanently changing the perception and consumption of coffee in the Vietnamese market.[10]

During a business trip to Germany in 2003, Thao became aware of the potential of the instant coffee business, a relatively underexplored market in Vietnam due to a reluctance in the local coffee industry to develop a perceived “fake” variety of coffee. Convincing Vu to support the new line of business—which he named “G7” in reference to his ambition to penetrate the world's most developed markets[11]—Thao led Trung Nguyen to invest in production facilities and launched the brand in Vietnam at a high-profile event at the famous Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, where during a blind taste test involving 20,000 drinkers, 89 per cent said they preferred G7 over a foreign brand.[8] G7 went on to take the top market share of 38 per cent in the product category within eight years.[12]

In 2006, Thao became Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors as well as the Deputy General Director of Trung Nguyen Group.[13]

In 2008, Thao founded Trung Nguyen International as a springboard to launch the Trung Nguyen and G7 coffee brands internationally.[14] G7 instant coffee became a high-performing commodity traded by the firm, selling in 60 countries around the world and achieving significant market penetration in China, South Korea and the US.[15]