TRAVINA does not own a plantation. It owns a workshop and a brand. The tea is grown by ninety member households on their own land in Dai Tu and La Bang, and about 62 per cent of them are from ethnic minority communities of these uplands. This page is about how that actually works, in numbers rather than sentiment.
1. The number that explains everything else
Smallholders produced 60 per cent of the world’s tea in 2022, and in Vietnam and China they produce around 80 per cent of it. Of the roughly 13 million people who work in tea worldwide, about 9 million are smallholder farmers. Meanwhile tea auction prices have fallen for four decades in real terms, dropping below USD 2 per kilo in 2020, and producer prices sit between USD 0.16 and 0.70 per kilo in the major origins (IISD Global Market Report: Tea, 2024).
The same report contains the figure that matters most to anyone reading this from outside Vietnam: Vietnamese tea farmers capture roughly 42 per cent of the net value added in their own supply chain. The other 58 per cent goes to everyone downstream of the hillside.
Put that next to the export price. Vietnam sells tea at about USD 1,644 to 1,737 a tonne against a world average near USD 2,600 (WTO Center Vietnam). A grower who is on the wrong side of both ratios — a low world price and a small share of it — cannot afford to farm carefully. That is the problem a cooperative exists to solve, and it is why we talk about price structure rather than about empowerment.
2. What membership actually means here
A cooperative is a legal form, not a mood. Concretely, in ours:
- Members own their land. They are not tenants, employees or contract labour. Around 90 households farm a combined 40.5 hectares, so the typical plot is well under a hectare.
- Fresh leaf is bought at an agreed price, set with members rather than taken from the day’s spot market. That is what makes a two-year investment in soil rational for a family farming half a hectare.
- Grading happens on delivery, in front of the grower. Bud, one bud and two leaves, stalk length. A grower who can see how the grade was decided can farm towards the higher one.
- Each household keeps a cultivation record book. This is the unglamorous document that turns a spray-free claim into something auditable.
- Processing, grading, packing and export sit with the cooperative, which is where the margin that used to leave the province now stays.
What we do not do is publish a breakdown of our members by ethnic group. The 62 per cent figure is cooperative data and we report it because buyers ask; going further and listing families by ethnicity would be publishing personal information that belongs to those families and not to us.
3. Skill that was not taught in a training programme
The English-language story about smallholder farmers is usually a story about need. In Thai Nguyen it is mostly a story about craft. Tea has been grown and fired in these communes for generations, and the households here are not waiting to be taught how; they are the reason the province has a reputation at all.
The founder’s own family has been in tea in Dai Tu since 1960. That is not a marketing origin story, it is why the cooperative buys from people it grew up around and why a handshake price holds.
The clearest external proof of skill is competition. Our artisans took Second Prize at the Golden Hands Tea Processing competition 2025, judged by the Thai Nguyen Department of Agriculture and Environment, and the cooperative sent artisan Pham Hoang Giang to Tea Masters Cup Vietnam 2025. Pan-firing remains a judgement made by a person watching the leaf; no sensor makes that call.
4. What the cooperative changed, and what it did not
Being specific matters more than being uplifting, so here is both sides.
| What changed | What has not changed |
|---|---|
| Leaf is bought at an agreed price rather than a daily spot price | Households still carry the weather risk on their own plots |
| Grading is done in front of the grower, so it can be farmed towards | A bad pest year still means a smaller crop and less income |
| Processing, packing and export margin stays inside the cooperative | The world tea price is still low and we do not control it |
| 17 households now hold VietGAP certification across 9.7 hectares | The other members are not certified yet; extending it costs money per household |
| Winter pruning is respected instead of forcing an extra picking | That means four months a year with no picking income from tea |
Anyone claiming a cooperative has solved smallholder income is overselling. What it can do is remove the two worst features of the commodity trade — an unpredictable price and an unexplained grade — and keep more of the value chain in the commune.
5. Ethnic minority households, said carefully
Thai Nguyen is a province of the northern midlands where several ethnic groups have farmed for a very long time. The San Diu, for example, numbered around 183,000 people at the 2019 census and are almost 90 per cent rural, with Thai Nguyen among their main provinces (Nhan Dan). Tay, Nung and Dao communities are likewise long established in these districts.
We are careful with this for two reasons. First, we have not found a published, reliable ethnic breakdown for Dai Tu or La Bang specifically, so we will not manufacture one. Second, our members are owners of their land and counterparties in a contract, not a demographic to be displayed. The 62 per cent figure is there because sustainability reporting asks for it, and that is the level of detail we think it is ours to give.
6. For buyers with a due-diligence file to fill in
One accuracy note first, because getting it wrong marks a supplier as unserious. Tea is not covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation. EUDR applies to cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood. We are not going to claim EUDR compliance for a commodity outside its scope.
What is real is that buyers reporting under CSRD, or running their own supplier codes, increasingly apply the same standard of evidence to every commodity they buy. We are documented to that level already:
- Legal entity: Tam Tra Viet Cooperative, brand TRAVINA, with the registration certificate published on our site
- Membership: around 90 households, 40.5 hectares, plot list held by the cooperative
- Traceability: growing-area code and lot codes resolving to a household group and a picking date; Thai Nguyen province operates 62 GPS-coded growing zones
- Labour: members farm their own family plots; the cooperative does not operate a plantation labour force
- Food safety: ATTP certificate, ISO 22000:2018 on the workshop, laboratory residue reports on finished tea
- Farming standard: VietGAP DVCL-VG-TT-24-19-68 on 9.7 hectares across 17 households, plus our Six No commitment on 5 hectares
Scans of the documents are on the certificates page. If your template needs something not listed here, ask; if we do not have it we will say so rather than send an adjacent document and hope.
7. Questions we get asked
Who actually owns the land the tea grows on?
The member households do. TRAVINA is a cooperative of growers, not a plantation company. We own the processing workshop and the brand.
How is the price to farmers set?
Fresh leaf is bought at a price agreed with members rather than at the daily spot price, and the grade is decided on delivery in front of the grower. We do not publish the figure publicly because it moves with grade and season, and we would rather quote it accurately to a buyer than approximately to a search engine.
Is this fair trade certified?
No. We hold VietGAP, ATTP and ISO 22000:2018, and we publish our own membership and area figures. Certification schemes are one route to credibility; publishing a verifiable structure is another, and it is the one we have taken.
Do children work in the gardens?
These are family smallholdings, and picking is adult work done in the early morning during the school day. The cooperative does not employ a labour force and does not engage child labour. A visiting buyer sees the gardens during picking hours and can judge for themselves.
Can we meet the growers?
Yes, and it is the single most useful thing a buyer can do. Dai Tu is about an hour and a half from Hanoi airport. See visiting the gardens.
Buy from the households, not from a warehouse
If you want tea whose supply chain you can describe in one sentence and prove in one folder, that is what this structure is for. Tell us the grades and volumes you are considering and we will send samples with the certificates, the lot origin and the harvest month attached.
Read next: the soil and the green transition, the two growing areas, or browse the range of teas. Our Vietnamese-language site for the domestic market is htxtamtraviet.com.
TRAVINA, Tam Tra Viet Cooperative
Dai Tu and La Bang, Thai Nguyen, Vietnam
Phone, Zalo and WhatsApp: +84 855 318 678 · Email: admin.travina@gmail.com
