Chu Long salt coffee: anyone can copy the drink, not the name

In early 2023, Chu Long salt coffee appeared in Ho Chi Minh City (TP.HCM) (Kenh14). According to the brand's website, the chain started from pushcarts on Cộng Hòa street. A sign on the cart read "Salt coffee 15k", meaning 15,000 dong a cup (Cafef). Per Cafef, the cart sold 30 cups on day one, 120 on day two and 500 on day three. By September 2026, the chain's website listed more than 60 stores (Cafef).

The man behind it is Dương Thanh Long, known as "chú Long" (Uncle Long). Some outlets, such as Dân trí, spell his middle name Thành; this article follows the name of the company that runs the chain, Dương Thanh Long Co., Ltd (Kenh14).

Our reading at 126Insights: any café that wants to sell salt coffee can do it. What Long did well was attach the drink to a name, then protect that name with concrete moves. He stopped franchising when the drinks came out uneven, registered the trademark, publicly stated which stores are real, and trained his own people. A founder planning to ride a year-end or Tet trend (Tet is the Lunar New Year, Vietnam's biggest shopping season) can look here for an answer to one question: when the trend passes, what do you still own?

What does Chu Long salt coffee sell, and how is it made?

Per Thanh Niên, Long first tried salt coffee by chance in Huế, and in his younger years he had worked in coffee for more than 10 years. He brought the drink south from Huế and changed how it is made. The Huế style drips coffee through a phin (a small Vietnamese metal drip filter) onto a layer of cream. At Chu Long, the coffee is brewed in advance (Báo Đầu tư).

It sounds like a kitchen detail, but in our view it is the one founders should notice most. A phin cup depends on the barista's hand and on waiting time. A pre-brewed cup lets a new hire get closer to the taste of a veteran, and the counter serves faster at rush hour. For a chain that wants many outlets, that is a big advantage.

The price is printed on the sign. It works like the price board on the banh mi cart at the head of an alley: customers know what they will pay before they stop. The 15,000 dong a cup at launch (Cafef) was both the price and the only slogan the cart needed.

When the recipe belongs to no one, what is left?

Salt coffee comes from Huế. Another café needs only one more line on the menu and a few practice sessions. The drink is like a hit song: anyone can cover it. The voice of the first singer is another matter.

For Long, that voice is the face of the seller. According to Báo Đầu tư, his daughter and grandchild filmed the cart and posted the videos to TikTok, and he answers customers' comments on Facebook and TikTok himself.

But a face is only a starting point. One person can stand behind one counter. To run 60 counters, the name has to stand when that person is not there.

Photo by Andreas Behr on Unsplash

How Chu Long salt coffee protects its name

Franchising shows it most clearly. In May 2023, per Dân trí, the chain had about a dozen branches and had franchised 4 small coffee carts. Cafef reports that he later saw the drinks were inconsistent across those shops and stopped, and that the provincial stores all opened where his own staff were present. "I decided not to franchise and to walk my own road myself," he told Báo Đầu tư. The same outlet says the chain trains young locals in TP.HCM, then sends them to run stores.

This is close to what 126Insights wrote about the marketing strategy of Xanh SM, the Vietnamese electric ride-hailing brand: customers pay for consistency. If a cup in Vũng Tàu tastes different from a cup on Cộng Hòa, the one who loses customers is the shared name of the whole chain.

The second move is legal. According to Báo Đầu tư, he registered trademark protection for "chú Long". The brand website also speaks up: the chain does not franchise, so any place calling itself an "agent" is a fake. A brand that has to post a warning like this has a name valuable enough that others want to borrow it. A Vietnamese proverb says "tốt danh hơn lành áo" (a good name beats good clothes). Once the name is good, it needs paperwork in your own name, which is what the article on naming a brand so it doesn't clash with others says to do before you print packaging.

Store counts differ by source because they were measured at different times:

• May 2023: about a dozen branches and 4 franchised carts (Dân trí).
• August 2023: more than 20 branches in TP.HCM, Biên Hòa, Vũng Tàu and Bình Dương (Cafef).
• August 2024: 44 shops (Cafef).
• December 2024: the brand website posted a recap, "Hành trình 2 năm: Từ 0 đến 50" ("Two years: from 0 to 50"). The figure is self-reported.
• September 2026: more than 60 stores per the brand website (Cafef).

Where the coffee cart model runs out

A pushcart costs little in rent, so a 15,000 dong price can hold. Move into a store and the arithmetic changes. According to Báo Xây dựng (September 2024), the chain's 7 m² shop on Nguyễn Huệ street rents for 100 million dong a month. Suppose it sold at 15,000 dong a cup, the price at launch: 100 million dong equals about 6,700 cups, or more than 220 cups a day just to pay the rent, before ingredients and wages. For Katinat, another Vietnamese drinks chain, rent can be treated like advertising spend. For a brand whose promise is a low price, expensive premises eat straight into that promise.

The second risk is that the price has become part of the name. The "15k" sign helps customers remember, but it also makes every price rise feel like rewriting the original promise.

The third risk is speed. Running everything yourself means each new store needs a trained person and the company's own capital. Opening more slowly is the price of consistency.

The industry context suggests that slowness may not be a disadvantage. According to Cafef, Mixue, the Chinese bubble tea chain, cut 428 stores, about 9%, in Vietnam and Indonesia, and Tuổi Trẻ writes that stores of the same brand are competing with each other. VnBusiness records The Coffee House going from 141 stores in 2024 to 93 in 2025, while Katinat planned 120 stores in 2026. The sector is not shrinking across the board. It is sorting itself out. In that period, a self-operated chain still went from 44 shops (August 2024) to more than 60 stores (September 2026), per the figures above.

When "Chu Long" stops meaning one person

In our view, the model's biggest risk is a name tied to one face. In September 2026, a video shot in Shanghai set off a rumor that the chain was opening a branch there. Cafef reported that it was a trip to Shanghai and Wuzhen (Ô Trấn) that the company organized for office staff and senior store managers.

126Insights reads this detail differently from the rumor. The video puts the words "chú Long" next to a group: store managers, people trained to brew the same way. We see it as employer branding, and as a way for the name to depend less on one person behind a counter. The chain's website also lists bottled coffee and packaged roast and ground coffee, so the name has started to travel beyond a cup of salt coffee. Long himself, per Thanh Niên, asks why foreign brands can enter Vietnam while Vietnamese products "don't dare to spread outward".

Salt coffee or Tet trend: what do you keep?

From this case, we draw three things a founder can do:

1. Attach the hot product to a name of your own and register that name early, before someone else calls themselves your "agent".
2. Design the product so other people can make it like you do. Long chose pre-brewed over the Huế phin drip; every industry will have its own version of that choice.
3. Pick a retail format that can carry the price you promised. A low price needs low occupancy costs to go with it.

Every trend eventually becomes common property. What remains is the name you registered and the quality you kept under it. Before ordering another batch of cups printed with your logo for this Tet's hot drink, check whose name is on the cup.