DH Foods is a household name in Vietnam for dipping sauces and dipping salts, two of the most common condiments in the country.
“Vietnam has a very strong ‘dipping culture’ when it comes to food consumption habits, and our local success so far has been very closely tied to this culture,” DH Foods Export Business Specialist Nigel Tieu told us.
“Just about all of our foods need to be accompanied by dipping condiments to be considered complete – for instance, Vietnamese eat our seafood with lime green chilli sauce and this is one of our most popular sauces; and we also eat our fruits with shrimp-infused dipping salts.”
Buoyed by its local success, the company has big plans in 2025 to expand export volumes to several international markets.
“We do have quite a bit of international presence, but this year the goal is to really drill down and go mainstream in markets like the EU, the United States, Canada, Japan and Thailand,” he added.
“So far we have been exporting the same dipping salts and sauces that we make for the Vietnamese community, but we are aware that the dipping culture is not prevalent in most other markets, so the strategy to go mainstream will be to develop new global products using our clean-label concept.”
DH Foods has focused its innovation expertise on making products with no added preservatives, synthetic colours or other such additives.
“Our unique selling point to differentiate ourselves from the competition has always been this focus on natural and fresh ingredients,” he added.
“This was one of our greatest challenges in the beginning, as when we first released our salts and sauces we had a lot of rejections from supermarkets that said the products looked ‘too simple’ or ‘not bright enough’ – but today, more consumers are more focused on quality and safety, and our position with clean label products has become an advantageous one.”
The firm will be applying this expertise to the development of more ‘global’ products moving forward in order to appeal to a wider, mainstream audience in markets all over the world.
“It will be quite a process, and our global innovations will be designed to ease more global consumers into the DH brand – so things they are familiar with such as soup bases for pho noodles or peanut sauces to accompany spring rolls will be top of the list,” Tieu added.
“We do expect sauces to make up a large part of our new product development efforts because we have just established a new sauce factory certified with BRCGS (British Retail Consortium Global Standards) certification, but fresh ingredients and clean label will continue to be at the core.”
Condiment trends from Vietnam to the world
In addition to Vietnam’s dipping trend, Tieu also highlighted the importance of convenience locally, particularly in the home cooking context.
“One of the reasons we decided to build our new sauce factory was due to the rapid turnover of our sauce products, because these are being used extremely quickly by consumers not only for dipping but also for cooking,” he said.
“It is not uncommon for us to see our consumers using an entire bottle of sauce in a single day, turning the dipping sauce into a convenient ready-to-cook (RTC) sauce by just adding a protein base such as pork or chicken.”
The firm believes that this trend can be transferrable into the international context, given the rising importance of convenience in many markets where consumers are increasingly time-poor.
