TRAVINA did not begin in a tea garden. It began with twenty years of sales floors, factories and software launches, and with a man who kept going back to Thai Nguyen.
Do Huu Thuan is the founder of TRAVINA, the tea brand of Tam Tra Viet Cooperative in Dai Tu district, Thai Nguyen province. In May 2025 the Vietnamese culture magazine Giai Tri Van Hoa published a profile of him titled Do Huu Thuan: Dan than va khat vong dua hon tra Viet cham den trieu trai tim – loosely, committing himself, and the wish to carry the soul of Vietnamese tea to a million hearts. What follows is that story retold for readers outside Vietnam, with the figures taken from our own cooperative records.
Twenty years in business before the first tea garden
Tea was not his first trade. Do Huu Thuan spent more than two decades in Vietnamese commerce, and not in a single industry. He is Chairman and CEO of Thuan Thao Group, a manufacturer of piping for agriculture and industry, and was previously CEO of Ong Viet Uc. He co-founded and directed Hachium, an online school platform. In e-commerce he served as Northern Sales Director at Haravan, and earlier as Director of Sales at Boxi Vietnam, Sales Manager at VNP Group, and Head of Sales and Marketing at T&T Education.
That background is visible in how the cooperative works today. Lot records, packaging, a published price list, a distributor policy, an export site in English: none of this is what a tea village normally builds for itself. It is what somebody builds who has spent years watching how Vietnamese products reach a shelf, and how often the farmer is the last person paid.
Why Thai Nguyen, and why tea
Thai Nguyen is the province Vietnamese people call de nhat danh tra, first among the famous tea lands. The family tea trade has run since 1960. Going back was less a business decision than an unfinished one.
The cooperative sits in Dai Tu, on the slopes between the Tam Dao range and Nui Coc lake, with a second site in La Bang commune between Kem stream and the Cua Tu waterfalls. Cool nights, heavy morning mist and a long, slow leaf: the conditions that give Thai Nguyen tea its particular sweetness after the bitterness clears.
Four generations on the same hillside
The tea did not start with him. His grandmother began making tea after the family moved up to Thai Nguyen to settle. His father, Do Chi Thanh, a former agricultural officer, took the gardens on and developed them. In 2019, after years working in technology, Do Huu Thuan came back to take them over in turn, and then brought the neighbouring households together into the cooperative that exists today.
In Thai Nguyen the trade is handed from one generation to the next, and that is why a garden here can be judged over decades rather than seasons: the person who answers for the tea is the person who will hand it on.
Tea as a bridge, not a commodity
The profile puts his view of tea plainly: a bridge between people, nature and tradition, and a culture worth carrying to every part of society rather than a product to be moved by the kilo. It is an unfashionable position in an industry that mostly competes on price per tonne, and it is the reason TRAVINA sells graded, single-origin lots under its own name instead of anonymous bulk leaf.
Three teas the cooperative is known for
TRAVINA is built around the classical Thai Nguyen grades. Moc cau, the curved hook, is the everyday standard of northern Vietnam, twisted tight and firm in the cup. Non tom, the shrimp bud, is picked finer and drinks lighter and sweeter. Nhat dinh tra, the single bud, is the rarest of the three, made only from the unopened tip and only in the amount the garden gives that morning.
The full range, with grades, packaging and specifications, is on our products page.
A cooperative, not a supply chain
Tam Tra Viet is a cooperative in the legal sense, not a brand with contract farmers behind it. Ninety member households farm 40.5 hectares. Sixty-two per cent of them are ethnic minority households. A separate VietGAP programme covers 17 households and 9.7 hectares, and we state the two figures apart rather than merging them into one nicer-sounding number.
What the members get is not only a buyer. It is a fixed grading standard, a workshop they can bring fresh leaf to within hours of picking, and a price that does not depend on who is at the gate that day. More on the growing area is on Origin and Factory, and the processing steps are set out in Our Clean Tea Journey.
Teaching tea, forty-four videos in
Alongside the cooperative, Thuan runs the TRAVINA YouTube channel, which had published 44 videos at the time of the profile: brewing method, how the grades differ, and the cultural background most buyers never get told. The stated ambition is to turn it into a proper online tea school rather than a marketing feed.
The next five years
The profile sets out four goals: to make TRAVINA a leading Vietnamese tea brand; to build a distribution network at home and abroad; to grow the YouTube channel into an online tea education platform; and to keep supporting farming households through a cooperative model that stays sustainable rather than extractive.
See it for yourself
None of the above has to be taken on trust. The gardens and the workshop are open to visitors all year, and guests pick, watch the firing and brew what they made. Details, itineraries and how to book are on Visit our tea gardens. For trade enquiries, contact us directly.
Source
This profile draws on the article Do Huu Thuan: Dan than va khat vong dua hon tra Viet cham den trieu trai tim by Alex, published on 24 May 2025 by Giai Tri Van Hoa: giaitrivanhoa.vn. Career details are as reported there. Figures for membership, planted area and certification are from the records of Tam Tra Viet Cooperative. Photographs are our own.
