Master returns home to revive family's 40-year-old profession, earning billions each year

Restoring traditional crafts

Graduated with a master's degree in Business Administration ( Da Nang University), upon graduation, Pham Van Binh (born in 1987, in An Luong village, Duy Hai commune, Duy Xuyen district, Quang Nam) easily found a stable job in Da Nang city.

However, witnessing his family's 40-year-old fish sauce facility struggling with fierce market competition, Mr. Binh has cherished the idea of ​​restoring and developing the traditional profession.

“There was a time when industrial fish sauce appeared and overwhelmed traditional fish sauce. Unable to bear seeing my parents’ lifelong passion ‘die’, I thought I needed to do something…”, the 8X from Quang Nam confided.

In 2019, after saving some capital from his salary as a financial analyst for a real estate company, along with investment funds, Binh boldly returned to his hometown to start a business.

From the old 1,000m2 facility that had been degraded, he invested more than 2 billion VND to renovate and expand to 2,000m2. Of which, the fish sauce salting area occupies about 1,400m2, with 35 wooden salt barrels with a capacity of 4 tons of fish and 53 cement salt tanks with a capacity of 10 tons of fish.

In addition, he also purchased a series of fish mixers, automatic fish sauce delivery systems, fish sauce filling machines, etc. to reduce labor and ensure food hygiene and safety.

He said he had the advantage of having two "home masters" to guide him and pass on decades of experience in making fish sauce.

Mr. Binh always strictly follows the traditional fish sauce production process, from selecting raw materials to marinating, fermenting, distilling, and checking protein content...

The raw material for fish sauce is anchovy.

To get the delicious flavor of fish sauce, tons of fresh anchovies after being purchased at Cua Dai beach (Hoi An, Quang Nam) will be mixed with large, pure white salt from the famous salt region of Phan Rang - Thap Cham ( Ninh Thuan ) in a ratio of 3 fish to 1 salt.

Then, modern machinery is used to bring raw materials from the tank into large wooden barrels, ferment for 12 - 15 months, then extract the fish sauce.

Next is the stage of filtering out impurities mixed in the fish sauce, the worker will collect the purest, most delicious drops of fish sauce, with a reddish-brown or straw-yellow color. In addition, the factory also salts shrimp paste and fish sauce on a large scale.

Mr. Pham Van Binh checks the quality of fish sauce.

Standard fish sauce has a cockroach-wing color and a mild aroma.

Revenue of 4 billion VND per year

Not only innovating technological lines to improve productivity, Mr. Binh also built management software, anti-counterfeit labels and made efforts to expand the consumer market abroad.

Currently, the family's fish sauce has been registered as a trademark at the Intellectual Property Office, has a QR code to trace the product's origin, and is regularly inspected for product quality by reputable agencies...

Mr. Binh's family's fish sauce product also won the C prize - Typical rural industrial product and was certified as a 4-star OCOP product by the People's Committee of Quang Nam province.

The facility invested in fish sauce extraction machines to reduce labor and ensure hygiene.

On average, each year, this facility supplies the market with more than 50,000 liters of fish sauce, 10 tons of shrimp paste, and 15 tons of fermented fish sauce.

In particular, in 2024, Mr. Binh successfully exported 2,500 liters of fish sauce to Africa. He is urgently completing an order of 4,000 liters of fish sauce to sell to the Ivory Coast.

According to Mr. Binh, in 2023 and 2024, the fish sauce facility's revenue will always reach more than 4 billion VND/year. After deducting all expenses, the profit will be about 500 - 600 million VND/year. The facility creates jobs for 9 local workers with an income of 8 - 10 million VND/person/month.

Sharing about future plans, Mr. Binh said that he will continue to expand the factory, improve technology, packaging designs and build quality control processes to aim at exporting fish sauce to European and American countries.

“I believe that organic and safe products are the future consumer trend. This is an opportunity for traditional fish sauce producers to make a living from their profession,” he confided.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/thac-si-ve-que-phuc-hoi-nghe-40-nam-cua-gia-dinh-kiem-bac-ty-moi-nam-2387306.html