The natural ingredients boom: What opportunities are there for Vietnam?

How Thailand companies add value to natural ingredients

On September 1, ahead of Vitafoods Asia 2026, which takes place from September 2 - 4 at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center (QSNCC) in Bangkok, Thailand, more than 40 journalists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, including a reporter from the Vietnam Agriculture and Environment Newspaper, visited Specialty Natural Products Public Company Limited (SNPS) and its subsidiary, Specialty Innovation Co., Ltd. (SI).

SNPS, established in 1999, standardises Thai and Asian botanicals into extracts for the global pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, functional food and cosmetic industries.

Specialty Innovation Co., Ltd. is the step after that: formulation, product development, registration support and OEM/ODM manufacturing of finished supplements, functional products, traditional medicines and personal care goods.

Put together, they represent the two links ASEAN most often gives away.

Southeast Asia grows a large share of what the world’s food industry now wants. The botanicals behind natural colours, natural preservation and clean-label additives come out of ASEAN soil.

Most of them leave the region as unprocessed commodity, are converted into standardised ingredients somewhere else, and are sold back to ASEAN manufacturers at many times the price.

“A country that exports dried plant material and imports finished ingredients has agreed to keep the smallest slice of its own value,” said by Dr. Theeraya Krisdaphong, Chief Executive Officer of Specialty Natural Products Public Company Limited.

“Everything that makes an ingredient valuable - the standardisation, the analytics, the safety file, the formulation - happens after the farm gate. That is the part we built here. That is the part ASEAN can build together”, Dr Theeraya emphasized.

Demand for natural colors is growing rapidly

ASEAN is home to nearly 700 million consumers and is among the world’s largest food-exporting blocs. Its advantage in natural ingredients is not labour cost. It is biology.

Butterfly pea, turmeric, annatto, gardenia, roselle, pandan, sappan and hundreds of other tropical species grow across the region in a variety and on a year-round cycle that temperate producers cannot replicate.

Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand each hold different parts of that portfolio, and each has been selling it separately, into the same handful of foreign converters.

What has been missing is the layer above the farm: standardised specifications, validated analytical methods, documented safety data, and extraction capacity that holds a shade and an active content consistent from batch to batch, container to container, harvest to harvest.

Meanwhile, global demand for natural ingredients is rising, particularly in the natural colors segment. Global brand owners are reformulating away from synthetic colours faster than the natural colour supply chain can serve them.

The obstacle is technical. Synthetic dyes are stable, cheap and predictable. Natural colours shift with heat, light, pH and time, vary with the harvest, and ask far more of the manufacturer standing behind them.

That difficulty is exactly why the opportunity is worth holding onto. Anyone can dry a flower. Delivering a heat-stable, pH-tolerant, fully documented natural colour at commercial scale is hard, and hard is where the margin and the defensibility live.

That difficulty is exactly why the opportunity is worth holding onto. Anyone can dry a flower. Delivering a heat-stable, pH-tolerant, fully documented natural colour at commercial scale is hard, and hard is where the margin and the defensibility live.

Media were shown the infrastructure behind that claim: Molecular extraction technology for purification at commercial scale; advanced chromatographic analysis providing precise fingerprinting of active ingredients batch by batch; the BIOCPX platform, which integrates multiple active ingredients through a molecular extraction process; and the company’s cultivation programme with Thai farming networks, which places traceability at the start of the chain rather than at the end of a form.

Cooperation to add value to Vietnam’s natural ingredients

SNPS and SI said they are looking for ASEAN partners rather than only ASEAN customers. Areas of cooperation include raw material partnerships with growers, cooperatives and processors across the region; joint development of natural colors and natural-based food additives; contract manufacturing, ODM and formulation support; as well as the sharing of technical and safety dossiers to facilitate product registration across ASEAN markets.

Dr. Theeraya said that: “We would rather share a large regional plate than defend a small national one”.

“Bring us the plant that grows in your country. We will bring the standardisation, the analytics and the factory. The market we are trying to win is not in Bangkok or Jakarta or Manila. It is in Europe, the United States and Japan, and no single ASEAN country wins it alone”, Dr. Theeraya said more.

Laure Desforges, Head of International Sales at SNPS in Bangkok, Thailand, said demand for natural ingredients is growing strongly, particularly in Vietnam.

Over the past two to five years, the Vietnamese market has changed significantly, with consumers, especially younger generations, becoming increasingly concerned about what they consume and the products they use on their skin. This is reflected in their growing tendency to check ingredient lists before making purchasing decisions.

According to Desforges, the proportion of natural ingredients in a product is therefore becoming an increasingly important factor in consumer choices. This growing preference for natural ingredients has also created favorable conditions for SNPS to enter the Vietnamese market, supported by strong local partners.

With its rich biodiversity, wide variety of native plants and growing demand for natural ingredients, Vietnam has significant opportunities to move further up the value chain. Alongside investment in standardization, deep processing and product development, stronger cooperation with international companies such as SNPS and SI, which have expertise in technology, research and market development, could help Vietnamese businesses add value to their natural ingredients, develop products that meet international standards and expand their access to global markets.