Not following trends like in previous years, bakeries in Ho Chi Minh City are returning to traditional flavors and investing in packaging and designs. A shop owner in District 7 custom-designed mooncake boxes that resemble luxurious designer handbags, and has already sold nearly 3,000 boxes, despite the price reaching nearly 2 million VND for a set of 6.​

There are still nearly 3 weeks until the Mid-Autumn Festival, but this bakery owner has sold nearly 3,000 boxes of these handbag-shaped mooncakes, even though each box is not cheap, ranging from 1.2 million to 1.8 million VND per box.

"We cannot compete on price with the market because all these boxes are custom-made in China and imported. Therefore, the price of these boxes is relatively high. The selling price of the red box is 1,750,000 VND for 6 pieces and the green box is 1,250,000 VND for 4 pieces," said Vo Thi Ha Hai, owner of Madi bakery (District 7, Ho Chi Minh City).

At this time, customers are already excitedly coming to pick up mooncakes as gifts or to give to friends and partners. Every day, Ms. Hai's shop has to deliver hundreds of mooncake portions. The owner and 10 skilled bakers work day and night to complete orders on time.

According to Ms. Ha Hai, this year's mooncake trend is returning to traditional flavors. In previous years, bakeries competed to produce 3D floral mooncakes, but this trend no longer exists this year. Shop owners are focusing on familiar flavors such as mixed, red bean, lotus seeds,… but enhancing the quality of the ingredients.

Similar to Ms. Hai's handmade bakery, another mooncake shop located on Nguyen Thai Hoc street, District 1, has launched a collection of traditional Vietnamese mooncakes. This unit is also actively investing in packaging to enhance competitiveness.

Not only is the packaging beautiful, but this shop is determined to secure the position of "beauty queen" in the bakery by creating beautiful and unique designs for their mooncakes.

Notably, when innovating the ingredients, this brand boldly uses fresh fruit to create fresh flavors for their mooncake designs. The shop stated that their mooncake designs are all less sweet.

"Our signature cake is the guava rose mooncake, which is the most beautiful and unique mooncake of our bakery for many years now. Additionally, this year the bakery also introduces a new cake called five-flavored shrimp mooncake. This is a savory cake but combines sweet and savory flavors. I think this is also a unique cake in this year's mooncake market," said Mr. Nguyen Van Duy, a representative of the shop.

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The report from a unit in Tan Phu District, Ho Chi Minh City, shows a distributor providing Mid-Autumn gift solutions. Customers have a wide variety of choices from many different well-known mooncake brands.

"Our criteria are to sell about 1,000 boxes a day, some days we achieve the target of 1,000 boxes, even exceeding 1,000 boxes, but some days we sell about 500-600 boxes, depending on the day and the customer demographics which are mostly businesses. Combined with distributors taking the source to redistribute, so revenue has increased compared to 2023," said Ms. Nguyen Thi Thao, director of this unit.

To stimulate shopping demand, this unit has also launched products on e-commerce platforms; at the same time, they organize livestream sessions right at the store to reach more customers across the country.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/thi-truong-ban...h-banh-moc-mac-len-ngoi-18524082917251289.htm