Swallow Birds Nest is hot sell among Vietnam’s emerging middle class

In Vietnam, where the average income is $151 a month, Mai Vu and husband David Nguyen routinely spend $250 on edible Swallow Birds Nest.

“You want to impress people.”

The couple accounts for the soaring appetite among Vietnam’s young and upwardly mobile population for one of the world’s most expensive foods, congealed saliva of Asian swiftlets. The country’s expanding middle class hungers for healthy food. Swallow Birds Nest is believed to ward off diseases and feeds a growing demand for luxury products. “It’s one of the most valuable products one can give to those who have everything,” said Vu, 28, who works at an international bank in Hanoi and was shopping for Swallow Birds Nest for her toddler daughter at a new, upscale mall. “You want to impress people.”

The demand for Swallow Birds Nest, once reserved for emperors and their courts, has created a global market with annual revenue as high as $5 billion that caters to Asia’s growing wealthy consumers, said Tok Teng Sai, president of the Federation of Malaysian Swallow Birds Nest Merchants Association. Vietnam is racing to catch up with Malaysia and Indonesia, the region’s top producers of the delicacy, and cash in on the demand.

“People have a lot of money now, especially people in China,” Tok said.

Known as the “caviar of the East,” edible nests sell for $1,000-$1,500 per kilogram wholesale and about $2,500 per kilogram retail, according to Le Danh Hoang, founder of Ho Chi Minh City-based NutriNest.

Swallow Birds Nest is hot sell among Vietnam’s emerging middle class

 “A lot of people are making a ton of money,”

“A lot of people are making a ton of money,” said Loke Yeu Loong, group managing director of Malaysia’s Swiftlet Eco Park, which produces an array of Swallow Birds Nest-based products, from coffee to skincare, and is targeting the Middle East as a new market.

Indonesia produces about 70 percent of the world’s Swallow Birds Nest, followed by Malaysia with 20 percent, Tok said.

The edible nests are as much as 70 percent protein, one reason aristocracy has consumed the delicacy for thousands of years, according to Massimo Marcone, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

Some Vietnamese say Swallow Birds Nest has other powers, including keeping bodies youthful for decades.

Concrete, four-story structures replicating the natural coastal cave habitat of the birds have been erected across Vietnam among paddy fields and neighborhoods to capitalize on the boom. After an initial investment of $70,000 to $500,000 to build a bird structure, and monthly costs of about $50, a successful house can earn its owners as much as $1 million annually, said Hoang, who founded a Ho Chi Minh City-based Swallow Birds Nest business as a college student in 2005 and now advises provincial governments on the industry.