Businesses like Life Gift Vietnam choose to operate behind the scenes, creating value and measuring their own success by the success of their partners. This is a notable trend in the rapidly growing and fiercely competitive functional foods industry.
Vietnam’s functional foods market is heating up daily, with hundreds of brands competing on supermarket shelves, in pharmacies, and online stores. Amid this wave, Life Gift chose a different path: instead of directly building a brand, it specializes in the Research, Development (R&D), and OEM/ODM (Original Equipment/Design Manufacturer) services for functional foods.
With its robust R&D capabilities, international-standard production lines, and experience collaborating with numerous brands, Life Gift has become a launchpad for partners to quickly own high-quality products that are competitive enough to conquer the market and build a lasting presence.
Master of Science Tran Viet Thanh—CEO of Life Gift Vietnam—shared insights on this strategic direction.
While most companies strive to build their own brands, why did Life Gift choose to stand “behind” the brand?
Life Gift doesn’t compete with its customers; we want them to feel secure knowing they have a strong partner behind them. We believe in the power of specialization, focusing on production, R&D, and quality control, while our partners leverage their strengths in branding, distribution, and marketing.
Once we defined our role as a manufacturer and formula developer, we were determined not to become a competitor to the very customers we serve. Instead, we collaborate to help them become stronger, faster, and more sustainable.
This model is familiar globally but not yet common in Vietnam. What are your thoughts on this?
In developed industrial nations, this is a standard model. Companies like TCI Bio (Taiwan), Kolmar Korea (South Korea), and Lonza (Switzerland) have proven that specialized manufacturing is the way to create lasting value.
In Vietnam, many companies still want to “do it all,” from production to retail. Life Gift chose to focus all its efforts on its core competencies, investing deeply, optimizing costs, and raising product quality standards—a crucial factor when stepping into the international market.
So, what are Life Gift’s manufacturing strengths?
We have an office in Ho Chi Minh City and a GMP-standard factory in Cau Tram Industrial Park, Rach Kien, Tay Ninh province. The factory is less than an hour’s drive from the center of Ho Chi Minh City, which is convenient for raw material procurement, goods delivery, and optimizing logistics costs.
The factory is a fully integrated facility with production lines, an R&D department, a testing lab, and an independent quality management system. We can produce a wide variety of dosage forms, such as capsules, powders, tablets/coated tablets, milk powder, and liquid supplements.
What sets us apart is that Life Gift owns proprietary formulas based on scientific research and collaborations with various institutions, such as the Faculty of Pharmacy at Nguyen Tat Thanh University, to facilitate technology transfer and ensure complete technical documentation.
Many manufacturing companies keep their formulas confidential. What about Life Gift?
No. We choose transparency. Product formulas and documentation are fully shared so our partners can easily publicize and market them. A collaborative relationship can only be sustainable with absolute transparency and trust.
What did Life Gift do to meet international standards from the very beginning?
From the start, we aimed to meet the most stringent standards. We invited experts from Malaysia and Vietnam and invested in infrastructure and human resources. The factory applies FDA, ISO 22000:2018, and GMP standards licensed by the Food Safety Department—Ministry of Health.
Over the past six years, we have helped many partners complete the official export documentation for demanding markets like the U.S. and South Korea.
Besides manufacturing, does Life Gift participate in the medicinal supply chain?
We are developing a closed-loop value chain from raw material areas to finished products, especially for precious medicinal herbs and agricultural products like Ngoc Linh ginseng and coffee. Life Gift collaborates with businesses, cooperatives, and farmers in Nam Tra My (Quang Nam) for deep processing, enhancing the value and competitiveness of these products. This also demonstrates our commitment to preserving valuable medicinal resources and improving the income of people in these raw material regions.
What message do you want to convey to your partners and the market through this strategy?
This “behind-the-scenes” strategy not only helps Life Gift maintain a competitive advantage but also contributes to raising the quality standards of Vietnam’s functional foods industry. When a partner’s brand prospers, that success is also a testament to Life Gift’s capabilities—a “behind-the-scenes enabler” strong enough to elevate Vietnamese products to international standards. In a volatile market, we believe that staying committed to specialization is the foundation.
Thank you!
Related Posts