Vietnam coffee exporters await official guidance as EUDR deadline nears

Large companies have around five months before the regulation takes effect, while small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have about 11 months to prepare.

Alongside their own efforts to transform, businesses say unified guidance from regulatory agencies is needed soon to implement the regulation effectively and avoid disruption to export operations.

Companies move at own pace

Kevyn Nguyen, founder of TheOrganiKcoffee, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) online newspaper that although his company is not required to comply with EUDR until 2027, European partners had already sent compliance roadmaps and requirements back in April.

He said the core of this regulation comes down to traceability.

Every plot of land has to be mapped with GPS coordinates, and companies must prove nothing was grown on land deforested after December 20, 2020.

Having followed an organic farming model for years, TheOrganiKcoffee has already built a growing-area database linked to digital mapping, which has made meeting the traceability requirements easier.

"However, we only manage two separate farms and do not buy from unverified sources, so we can control quality and documentation,” Nguyen said.

“For companies buying from hundreds or thousands of households, the situation is completely different.”

And plenty of those companies are not sitting still either. Smaller exporters are investing where they can.

Nguyen Duc Hung, director and chairman of Napoli Coffee, described his company's approach as a step-by-step roll-out, prioritizing growing areas that already have solid data and expanding from there.

Napoli is also hedging its bets by pushing into new export markets, including China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, to take some of the pressure off during the transition.

Still, none of it works as well as it should without direction from above.

What businesses are waiting for is specific, unified guidance from ministries and local authorities on how compliance is actually supposed to happen.

"Once there is unified guidance, we will have a basis to work with farmers, helping them complete their growing-area records, determine coordinates, and build traceability data from the very start of the supply chain," Hung said.

Traceability set to become core infrastructure for coffee industry

For the bigger players, EUDR is not really up for debate. It is simply where global agricultural trade is headed.

Thai Anh Tuan, general director of Dak Lak 2-9 Import-Export Co., Ltd. (Simexco Daklak), pointed to the network his company has spent over 15 years building, linking nearly 60,000 farming households, backed by software that traces products down to individual farms and processing plants.

Even so, Tuan said, the costs add up fast.

Traceability tech, international certifications, data systems, and deeper processing all take serious capital, and without banks and long-term financing behind them, even large companies feel the strain.

Furqonuddin Ramdhani, product technology director at Koltiva, said EUDR is only the starting point of a broader wave of sustainability standards that exporters will have to meet in the years ahead.

CS3D (the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive), CSRD (the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), and mandatory climate emissions disclosures are stacking up alongside EUDR as the benchmarks importers now use to judge whether a supplier is ready to do business with them.

"Traceability and verification are not a nice-to-have anymore," he said.

"They are becoming the core infrastructure that decides whether Vietnamese coffee can hold onto its place in the EU market in the years ahead."