Which novel protein should Vietnam build?

A supply-side scoping study of alternative protein in Vietnam Published by altprotein.vn · Ho Chi Minh City · September 2026

Revision note#

Second public revision, 18 September 2026. An external reviewer went through the first public version and found six things worth changing. All six are applied here, and each is flagged where it appears.

1. The animal feed approval route is no longer described as a thirty-working-day process. That timeline applies to feed additives and to ingredients already on the permitted list. How a genuinely new microbial ingredient joins that list is undocumented, and this report said so in one chapter while quoting the fast timeline in another.
2. The aquafeed market figure has been replaced with a smaller and more honest one. The 3.4 to 4.0 million tonne total is real, but most of it is pangasius feed, which contains almost no fishmeal to displace. The number that matters is the displaceable fishmeal pool, around 350,000 to 450,000 tonnes.
3. The cost advantage claim has been bounded. Cheap Vietnamese electricity is worth less than the headline suggests, and a tropical site pays part of it back in cooling.
4. The Decree 182 investment thresholds were misstated and are corrected.
5. The cultivated seafood cell line claim was too strong. Research lines for striped catfish and a hybrid shrimp line do exist; what does not exist is a food-grade production line.
6. The koji route carries a strain-safety burden that the first version did not mention.

Two notes on what this revision is not. It is not a re-verification of the underlying research: no source was reopened. And several figures the reviewer supplied, including the first published estimate of Vietnam's cassava pulp tonnage, are not in this version, because they could not be traced to a primary source in time. They are listed in chapter 16 as questions now closer to being answered.

How to read this#

This report answers one question: which novel alternative protein categories should Vietnam prioritise, ranked by how viable they are and how well they suit Vietnam specifically, under both an export-led and a domestic framing.

It is written for three kinds of reader, and arranged so that each can stop where their interest stops.

• If you want the answer, read Parts 2 and 3. About twelve pages, no background assumed. Chapter 1 explains every term used.
• If you want the evidence, read Parts 4 and 5. Each chapter opens with a plain-language summary, then goes into the numbers.
• If you want to judge how much to trust it, read Parts 6 to 8: what held up, where published sources contradict each other, what nobody has measured, how the research was done, and every source.

Nothing after Part 3 is needed in order to understand Parts 2 and 3.

A note on what this is. This is a desk study, not a business plan and not a laboratory result. It establishes what is known, what is not, and what the cheapest next step is in each case. Where the evidence is thin, it says so rather than filling the gap with material from another country. Nobody in this project has visited a starch mill, called a feed buyer or written to a regulator. Chapter 17 lists nineteen things that would fix that, eleven of which cost nothing but a phone call.