How Nature’s Way turned informal demand into a trusted Vietnam business

This international business case looks back from 2019 to 2026. Australian health brand Nature’s Way entered Vietnam in 2019; seven years later, Vietnam had become its largest Southeast Asian market. The company told Austrade that it expected fiscal 2026 revenue to rise 75% year on year. That is a company forecast, not a completed or audited result.

Before the official launch, Vietnamese people living in Australia were already sending the products home to relatives. The company treated this voluntary cross-border buying as a demand signal. The lesson for a small brand is not that informal reselling guarantees success, but that product choices, purchase frequency, destination cities and user feedback can be turned into questions to test before committing to formal distribution.

At entry, adult supplements faced many established international competitors. Children’s products had less competition but similarly strong demand, so Nature’s Way used that category as an opening. Overseas expansion therefore need not begin with the home market’s bestseller; a practical comparison should examine existing rivals, use occasions and available retail shelf space by category.

After counterfeit food and supplement incidents in Vietnam in 2025, authorities reviewed food-safety rules and tightened registration, testing and import requirements for supplements. Growth therefore came with compliance work. The editorial takeaway is to list proof for formulation, labelling, tests, registration and the responsible importer before treating a distributor discussion as the final hurdle.

The company says it invested in brand building around efficacy, authenticity and compliance. Those investments coincided with growth, but the public evidence does not prove that one strategy caused every result. A transferable practice is to make trust deliverable: keep document versions aligned, enable distributors to identify genuine goods, and give consumers a reliable official information source.

Austrade notes that companies in highly regulated sectors must understand local law and everything required to demonstrate compliance. A small brand can create an entry checklist covering who confirms classification, who owns each document, who updates it after formulation or packaging changes, and how the importer keeps records. It can then test one category, one city and one qualified partner.

The point is not to copy a children’s supplement strategy. It is to separate growth into three testable moves: validate demand through existing cross-border buying, find a specific category with lighter competition, and build trust through compliance and authenticity controls. A useful next action is to review three months of overseas enquiries, select one product, and ask a local importer for the formal market-entry document list.

Sources

• Consumer trust helps Nature’s Way expand into Vietnam | Austrade

Some images in this article are generated illustrations.