Company pins high hope on 'vegetarian pork'

Following the attention-grabbing launch of “banana-fed pigs” products by businessman Doan Nguyen Duc, “vegetarian pork” branded BaF Meat by his peer Truong Sy Ba has debuted amid high company expectations.

The new product was launched Wednesday by BaF Vietnam Agriculture JSC (BaF) under Tan Long Group, listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE) as BAF.

According to BaF chairman Truong Sy Ba, “vegetarian pork” is created from pigs that only eat bran wholly made from plant-based materials and plant-based protein. The vegetarian bran does not contain ingredients from animal protein sources. Produced in the BaF factory, it is only used to feed the company’s pigs.

The “vegetarian pigs” are different from normal ones as the breed is imported from Canada. Such pigs are raised under a closed process called 3F (feed-farm-food), making their meat more delicious, he said.

Sharing the reason why he chose to invest in “vegetarian pigs”, Ba said in the past, pork was delicious but now it is very difficult to find that taste since pigs are fed with inorganic bran.

In addition, traditional pig farming did not ensure economic efficiency but caused many problems like diseases and oversupply, he said, noting that at the end of 2019, the live pig price was only about VND18,000 ($0.7) per kilogram, cheaper than vegetables.

“With a wish to raise the quality of food from livestock as well as improve breeding skills, Tan Long Group and I decided to embark on researching and developing a kind of pork that retains the taste of meat as in the past and is really good for people’s health. In this way the BaF Meat vegetarian pork brand was born,” he said.

He revealed that BaF's strategy is not to compete with small breeders, but instead, to focus on chain management and self-distribution of products through Siba Food, a chain of convenient stores already present in many localities nationwide, including Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Nghe An and Hai Phong.

At present, on Siba Food’s online channels, BaF Meat products are sold for VND107,000-173,000 ($4.3-6.9) per kilogram. It means that right from the beginning, BaF had positioned itself in the high-end segment, competing fairly with rivals in the Vietnamese branded pork market.

Ba confidently affirmed that the “vegetarian pork” is a special product as not many companies in Vietnam can produce the “vegetarian bran” like his firm.

BaF aims to raise 200,000 “vegetarian pigs”, offering 1.6 million BaF Meat-branded products to the market by 2030. Its products are expected to be put on sale at 1,500 Siba Food stores and 15,000 BaF Meat shops across the country.

Earlier, Hoang Anh Gia Lai JSC, with Doan Nguyen Duc as chairman, had captured customer attention with pork produced from banana-fed pigs. The average price of its pork is about VND62,000 ($2.5) per kilogram.

Vietnam is among the six largest pork producers and consumers in the world, just behind China, the EU, U.S, Russia and Brazil. Currently, its demand for pork consumption is about 27 kilograms per person per year, which is forecast to increase to 35 kilograms in 2023.