Why Korean F&B Brands Came to Vietnam's Biggest Franchise Show Looking for Master Franchisees

Vietnam's biggest franchise-industry gathering, the Vietnam International Franchise Show (VIFS) 2026 — also marketed under the name VietFranchise 2026 — opened on October 29, 2026 at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Center (SECC) in Ho Chi Minh City and ran through October 31, drawing close to 100 participating businesses, according to Vietnamese business outlet VnBusiness. The show, organized by COEX Vina and the Vietnam Franchise & Licensing Network (VFLN) and co-located with Coffee Expo Vietnam, covered the usual spread of franchise categories on display at these events: food and beverage, beauty and healthcare, fashion and apparel, retail and wholesale, startup models, and education and training. What made this particular edition worth a closer look wasn't the headcount — it was who showed up and why. Among the roughly 100 exhibitors, ten Korean businesses and organizations took fifteen booths between them, and Vietnamese newspaper Tien Phong reported that eight of those were F&B brands attending specifically to find Vietnamese partners willing to take on master-franchise rights for their concepts. That is a meaningfully different pitch than the one usually associated with a Vietnamese franchise show. Instead of Vietnamese brands courting outbound investors and overseas developers, a cluster of established Korean F&B names came looking for Vietnamese operators to run their stores on their behalf, under Vietnamese capital and Vietnamese management.

The Direction of Traffic Has Flipped

For most of the past decade, the Vietnamese franchise story that foreign trade press told was almost entirely outbound: Vietnamese beverage and F&B brands signing master-franchise deals to enter India, the Philippines, the Gulf and beyond, carrying the country's tea, coffee and quick-service formats to new markets one territory at a time. VIFS 2026's Korean F&B delegation points to a second, less-discussed track running in the opposite direction — Vietnam as a destination market now mature enough that foreign brands recruit local master franchisees rather than open directly themselves. That shift tracks with the underlying growth of Vietnam's registered foreign-franchise base: by the end of 2024, Vietnam had roughly 330 officially registered foreign franchise brands, close to three times the count of a decade earlier, with food and beverage accounting for about 45% of that total, according to a 2026 market review published by Japanese advisory firm B&Company. A market that has absorbed that much foreign-brand volume over ten years has, by necessity, built up a deeper bench of local operators with the capital, real estate access and multi-unit experience that a foreign franchisor looks for in a master-franchise partner — which is exactly the profile a recruitment booth at a three-day trade show is designed to surface in volume.

Why a Recruitment Booth, Not a Flagship Store

The choice to recruit a master franchisee rather than open a company-owned flagship store is not incidental — it is close to standard practice for a foreign F&B brand entering a market like Vietnam for the first time. A master-franchise structure hands the capital risk, the real estate negotiations, the food-safety and import-licensing paperwork, and the hiring to a partner who already knows how to navigate them locally, while the brand keeps its own balance sheet untouched and collects royalties and development fees instead of absorbing store-level losses during an unfamiliar market's learning curve. It also lets a Korean F&B brand test Vietnamese consumer demand through a single committed partner's rollout before deciding whether the market deserves a second territory, a bigger unit-count target, or an adjacent product line, without the sunk cost of a directly operated network if the format doesn't translate the way it did at home. For a brand that chooses to attend a three-day trade show specifically to meet candidates, rather than negotiate quietly with one pre-selected partner, the economics only make sense if Vietnam already has enough qualified operators walking the floor to make the open search worthwhile — which is itself a signal about how far the local operator pool has grown beyond a handful of well-known conglomerates.

What Vietnamese Franchisors Should Take From the Other Side of the Table

The more useful lesson from VIFS 2026 may be for the Vietnamese brands in the audience rather than for the Korean brands doing the recruiting. Every criterion a Korean F&B brand is quietly applying as it screens booth visitors — a track record of running more than one location successfully, access to capital that doesn't depend on the franchisor's own money, familiarity with lease negotiation and local hiring, and a willingness to commit to a specific unit count rather than settle for just an exclusive territory — is the same criterion a Vietnamese brand needs to apply when it is the one searching for an international master franchisee in India, the Gulf or elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Vietnamese franchisors spend most of their time pitching to be chosen by a developer abroad; VIFS put some of them in the position of doing the choosing instead, screening Korean brands' royalty structures, territory sizes and support commitments for whether they actually make sense for a Vietnamese operator's balance sheet. That reversal of roles is worth more to a Vietnamese brand's own outbound ambitions than another pitch deck, because it exposes exactly what a serious franchisor demands before it hands over territory — the same bar a Vietnamese brand will be measured against the next time it sits across the table from a developer in Mumbai, Manila or Riyadh.

Go Global Holdings tracks exactly this kind of two-way signal from Vietnam's franchise trade-show calendar, on the view that the partner-screening standards foreign brands bring into Vietnam are the clearest preview of what its own portfolio brands will be judged against the next time they go looking for a master franchisee abroad.