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