Start a business with a plant that grows on a fence

While looking to buy plants to decorate his coffee shop, Tran Bao Huy saw people picking bunny ear cactus to stir-fry with meat, and the idea of starting a business popped into his head.

The man born in 1989 immediately called his wife and said: "Close the coffee shop, I have found a new way to start a business."

It was 2021, Tran Bao Huy had just quit his job managing a homestay in Da Lat to return to Khanh Hoa to open a coffee shop. Hearing from friends that the bunny ear cactus was a beautiful decorative plant, he went to buy it.

"The seller pointed to the cactus growing on the fence in front of the door and asked if this was the right variety, then conveniently picked it and cooked it for dinner," Huy said.

He did not expect this thorny plant to be edible and was even more excited when he was introduced to other uses such as treating bone and joint problems and diabetes.

Tran Bao Huy next to a 15-year-old bunny ear cactus garden of a resident in Phu Yen . Photo: Character provided

When he was a mechanical engineer working for a Japanese company in Ho Chi Minh City and then a homestay owner in Da Lat, Huy wanted to start a business in agriculture . Having traveled along the Central region and witnessed many places where desertification could not survive, Huy thought that the bunny ear cactus would be the savior of these lands. After learning more, he also learned that this type of plant was once planted on a pilot basis in Ninh Thuan as animal feed, but the project failed due to lack of output.

"If fresh ingredients can't compete, then process them into food," Huy told his wife. After watching videos of people in Mexico processing cactus into juice, pickles, cakes... he decided to try it.

Ordering 3,000 trees from Phu Yen, Huy temporarily planted them on his parents' land. Seeing her son, who used to work for a foreign company and earn thousands of dollars, quit his job to find a way to grow cacti - a plant that was only used for hedges, Mrs. Tran Thi Que was "worried", afraid that her youngest son was going crazy.

Huy and his wife went to Da Lat to rent 3,000 square meters of land to grow cacti, preparing ingredients to make some dishes such as pickling and making juice. "But the pickled cacti had a white scum and slime running down them, while the juice tasted undrinkable," Huy recalled of the first experimental batch.

He knew he needed to learn about food technology, so he bought books to research and watched foreign videos on how to process cactus. But after a year of experimenting, Huy's product was just failure after failure.

Tran Bao Huy and his wife harvest bunny ear cactus in Bac Ai district, Ninh Thuan, November 2022. Photo: Provided by the character

Meanwhile, the cactus garden in Da Lat was dying because it was being eaten by snails. Huy tried every way to prevent it, from spreading lime powder to sprinkling eggshells, but after a few days of heavy rain, all his efforts were washed away.

Seeing thousands of cacti gradually fall, the couple left Da Lat for Ninh Thuan to build a new garden.

The land they chose was Bac Ai, a mountainous district in Ninh Thuan province with a semi-desert climate and arid soil, suitable for growing cacti. They rented a 3-hectare plot of land and planted 5,000 new plants. Four months later, the cacti yielded their first harvest.

Huy continued to research on making pickles with juice using fresh ingredients. After three months, the pickle product was successful. At this time, he wanted to open a small factory with a closed and modern process.

But in a land with more than 95% Raglai and Cham ethnic people, after searching for a month without being able to rent a suitable workshop, Ms. Minh became discouraged and advised her husband to give up and return to the city.

"Give me two more years, if I don't succeed I will listen to you," Huy promised his wife and then wrote a commitment himself.

A few weeks later, they found a newly built house, more than a kilometer from the garden, to use as a workshop. Huy bought more processing machines, presses, material cutters, and sterilizers to process pickled cactus and then sell them experimentally on his personal page.

The product had just become familiar with the market when Huy wanted to expand the factory, the owner asked for the house back. The garden owner also offered to take back the land. The couple's nearly year of hard work once again went down the drain.

The young couple gritted their teeth and dug up thousands of cactus roots to transport back to their hometown in Phu Yen. "The cactus thorns pricked their hands, faces, and bodies, but no one dared to complain, afraid of an emotional explosion," Huy recalled.

After a week of cleaning the garden, the couple was tanned from sun exposure. There were days when they couldn’t even swallow the rice because they couldn’t breathe. But luckily for them, the climate suited their plants, so they grew well and had enough raw materials to continue researching how to make juice.

In July 2023, the first bottles of cactus juice were successfully produced and can be preserved for a year in the natural environment.

"I was so happy I cried," Huy recalled. "It took more than two years of sweat, tears and blood to get the finished product."

Having succeeded with cactus juice and pickles, this man continued to research making tea bags and starch to support diabetes treatment.

In early 2024, after receiving a food safety certificate, Huy set up a factory and launched his products on the market. He purchased raw materials from several coastal provinces and called on 20 more households in Phu Yen to grow bunny ear cactus to supply the company.

In mid-2024, Huy's products made from bunny ear cactus entered the final round of the 10th Green Startup - Sustainable Development Competition nationwide.

Along with the promotion of sales, one person introduced another, the juice, tea bags and cactus powder became more known in big cities like Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

Corner of Tran Bao Huy's one-year-old bunny ear cactus garden in Phu Yen. Photo: Provided by the character

Witnessing Huy's entrepreneurial journey, Mr. Nguyen Xuan Duy, lecturer of the food technology department at Nha Trang University and head of the Phu Yen province startup club, commented that this man has a determination and perseverance that few people have.

"Huy is the first person to develop food from the bunny ear cactus not only in Phu Yen but also in the whole country," said Duy, believing that Huy's project has great potential to develop into a commercial production model in arid lands where it is difficult to grow other plants.

Now seeing her son appearing in the media, promoting products made from bunny ear cactus, Mrs. Que no longer asks when her youngest son will go to the city to work.

Every time Huy called to ask, his mother laughed: "He looks crazy but he still makes things happen."

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