Home
The Sausage King of Hanoi
Category: General Published on Saturday, 09 January 2010 14:00 Written by Mike Ives Hits: 1438
Four summers ago, Andreas Campioni was working for a marketing firm in the US. It was a decent way to apply the marketing degree he’d just earned from Ohio State University.
“But something was missing,” he says. The German twentysomething was restless – he wanted a challenge he could sink his teeth into.
A Bit of a Porker
Meanwhile, Campioni’s father, a lifelong entrepreneur, was launching a German-style sausage company in Vietnam. Dad didn’t know jack about sausage; he owned no sausage-making gear and he wasn’t sure if the Vietnamese would warm to his product. Did Andreas want to help?
Campioni Junior flew to Germany for a four-day crash course in food production. Then he boarded a flight to Hanoi. Four years later, he is international marketing director of Duc Viet Foods, Vietnam’s first and only German-style sausage company.
Duc Viet sausages, cold cuts and condiments are sold in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong and Vietnam’s other metro areas. Campioni says Duc Viet’s Hanoi-area factory turns about 100 pigs into more than six tonnes of processed and fresh meat every day. In 2011, the company will be floated on the Vietnamese stock exchange.
“This was just a crazy idea,” says Campioni, now 30, on a recent Wednesday evening over schnitzel and beer. “But somehow it worked out.”
The Birth of the Sausage
The Duc Viet story began in 1975. That’s when Michael and Lilo Campioni took jobs at Hanoi’s East German Embassy. In those days, Campioni Junior says, it was hard for foreigners to befriend locals. But his parents made friends anyway.
When their contracts ended, the Campionis returned to East Germany. Campioni Senior founded several companies that sold products like drywall, windows and doors, and Russian fish tanks. But he always talked about starting a business in Vietnam.
In the early 1990s, Campioni Senior returned to test his luck. First he sold windows and doors – but Vietnamese consumers couldn’t afford them. Then he bid on a window contract at Noi Bai International Airport. Rejected, he started a brewery, but that didn’t work, Campioni Junior says, because of technical problems.
Whenever dad flew to Germany, his Vietnamese friends asked him to bring back sausage. Many of them had studied in East Germany and they missed the taste.
“How can I do that?” the German entrepreneur asked himself. “I have so many friends, and I can’t bring 100 kilos each time I come.”
By 1997, Campioni Senior and his Vietnamese partner, Dr Mai Huy Tan, were drafting plans to manufacture German-style sausages for Vietnamese eaters. In 2000, they leased a 300-square-meter former fish factory on the western edge of Hanoi. Skeptical German sausage experts offered advice. Soon Duc Viet slaughterers were transforming pigs into links. At first, Duc Viet targeted embassies and foreign companies. But before long, Campioni Senior was taking orders from wholesalers.
Size Matters
Duc Viet is now headquartered at a 30,000 square-metre factory, 30 kilometres from Hanoi (Andreas Campioni declined this reporter’s request for a tour). The company sells about 75 percent of its products to small households – a good sign, Campioni says, because it means Duc Viet sausages are part of local food culture. He says that 99 percent of Duc Viet’s clients are Vietnamese, and that some customers even use his products for ancestor worship. The links are popular, partly because they are tailored to Vietnamese tastebuds. For example, Duc Viet sausages are less salty than traditional German sausages because Vietnamese eaters are more salt-sensitive.
Campioni says Duc Viet is a great model for other medium-sized German companies doing business in Vietnam. Making sausages for foreign clients, he says, is a kind of cultural exchange. And he likes working in the private sector, as opposed to a “development service financed by German taxpayers”.
Nguyen Thi Thanh Tam, director of Hanoi International Economic Consulting, says Duc Viet’s business model reflects an understanding of Vietnamese culture. Nguyen, who studied and worked in Germany for 13 years, now advises about 20 German companies with Vietnamese operations. She says Andreas Campioni has followed his father’s example of befriending local clients and coworkers.
“Now Andreas is a friend of Vietnam,” she says. “He could have a better life in Germany, but he stays here instead.”
Campioni says he plans to stay in Hanoi until 2011 – the year he’ll complete his MBA degree. In the meantime, he’s marketing his products, talking with reporters, expanding distribution and building infrastructure. Next year, Duc Viet plans to increase factory capacity and ship sausages to Japan. Campioni says he’d like to open a pig-breeding farm near his production facility, rather than import swine from provincial farmers. His marketing materials include sketches of a bio-gas plant and an organic fertiliser factory.
Buying Big
It’s a Tuesday morning in Hanoi and Campioni chats with employees at Duc Viet’s flagship store. The signature neon green and yellow storefront sits on a quiet lane in the French Quarter. Horizontal refrigerators hum in a far corner. On a back wall, a shelf displays meaty accoutrement – olives, pickles, mustard and hot sauce. A gnarled wooden chopping block offers a pastoral contrast to the store’s sleek, corporate aesthetic.
Campioni, a friendly guy with an extra-deep voice, wears square glasses and a pressed white shirt. He is 2.02 metres tall, several heads taller than his petite Vietnamese employees. As he bends over a glass display case to ogle a package of Xuc xich Nurembe (Nuremberg-style sausage), a Vietnamese customer fills a shopping bag with condiments and shrink-wrapped meat. After paying at the register, she crams the bag into her motorbike basket and speeds away. It’s almost lunchtime.
The sausage magnate beams like a new father. “You should see this place one week before Tet,” he says. “Everybody buys ten kilos. Then they give the sausages away for presents and cook huge dinners!”