Pham Manh Dung, founder of Chef&go: From a small bakery to ambitious large chain

From a specialty bakery located in Hai Phong, Pham Manh Dung shaped Chef&go as a streamlined F&B model, taking quality and reasonable cost as the key to market expansion.

Pham Manh Dung, founder of Chef&go.

Hai Phong 's 2.0 specialties

While many young entrepreneurs look for opportunities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Pham Manh Dung chose Hai Phong as his starting point. “The rental cost is lower, and the market is not as saturated as in big cities, so F&B entrepreneurs like me can still find their own place,” Dung explained.

The founder, born in 1997, said that after working in the F&B and service industry in many different positions, from waiter to manager, he thought about the story of "doing something of his own". By chance, at the end of 2024, Dung "had the chance" to connect with a brother who used to be the head chef of a 5-star hotel in Hai Phong. So, one person with experience in operations management, one person with culinary expertise, together "joined forces" to open a specialty cake factory right in his hometown.

Hai Phong is a land with many specialties, but there is no truly outstanding specialty cake chain. If I do well, I can expand to develop more traditional specialty cakes from other localities. I believe this is an opportunity for me,” Dung affirmed.

Based on the Hai Phong baguette specialty, the two brothers researched and upgraded the beef pate baguette - version 2.0 of the baguette with many outstanding differences such as: the bread crust is made from natural yeast, firmer and crispier; the pate filling is made from glutinous liver and beef, so it is rich and fragrant. The beef pate baguette is known as the "soul" of the workshop, and is also Dung's favorite dish.

In addition to pate bread, the bakery also produces many other specialties of Hai Phong such as pate, baguettes, katka bread, and ancient sticky rice cakes... Among them, Dung "boasts" that the sticky rice cakes are produced from ancient yellow-flowered sticky rice grown in Dai Thang commune, Tien Lang district, Hai Phong (old) - a specialty rice variety passed down since the Ly dynasty, notable for its attractive aroma, high nutritional content, producing delicious, sticky rice grains that last a long time.

Ambition to become Vietnam's Mixue in the food industry

In early 2025, Dung opened a bakery, mainly serving on-site sales and wholesale. By mid-year, Dung opened the first Chef&go store in Hai Phong and last August, Dung opened 3 consecutive stores in Hanoi with different area modules, from 6 m2 to 20 m2.

“I hope that Chef&go will develop similarly to the way Mixue is thriving in the milk tea segment,” Dung said, adding that Chef&go’s strategy will be to develop a low-cost franchise model to create business opportunities for hundreds of store owners across Vietnam with low capital and stable profits of 15 to 30 million VND/month.

After a period of trial operation, the founder confidently asserted that he had optimized the operating process and was ready to package to expand the chain quickly and sustainably. The plus point of the Chef&go model is assessed to be its compact scale, even a store of only 6 m2 is enough to deploy.

As the name suggests, the brand aims at chef-quality dishes, serving the needs of quick shopping and take-away, suitable for the busy lifestyle of many customers today. Cakes sold in all stores will be produced centrally in the central kitchen, to ensure consistency in quality. Even the product price has been carefully calculated by Dung, ensuring that all customers in the low-end segment can access it.

“To build a strong chain like Mixue is doing in the beverage sector, the first thing is to develop a replicable business model, which is both simple and can control quality and costs,” Dung concluded. He also added that with Chef&go, bakery products will be easier to transport from the factory to the store and maintain consistency, compared to other sophisticated foods such as rice, noodles, vermicelli, pho...

In the context of the F&B industry entering a period of purification, Dung believes that opportunities for lean chains like Chef&go are wide open. According to the Vietnam F&B Market report published by iPOS in early October 2025, after the first purification in the first half of 2024, the F&B market continues to witness a second wave of purification taking place more strongly this year, when input costs of the entire industry increased sharply across the board. As of June 30, 2025, Vietnam only has about 299,900 F&B stores, equivalent to more than 50,000 stores that had to close in the first half of this year. Not to mention, in the Vietnamese market, there are very few food chains following a lean model targeting the low-end customer segment, due to the dual pressure of both optimizing costs and providing quality products. "This is an opportunity for lean chains that do well in terms of products to rise up and dominate the market," Dung confidently affirmed.

From now until the end of the year, the founder aims to open and franchise Chef&go stores to increase the number of Chef&go stores to 30. Dung also plans to soon bring the model to Ho Chi Minh City, where people easily accept new products and the trial sales of specialty cakes in this market have initially shown results.

Source: https://baodautu.vn/pham-manh-dung-nha-sang-lap-chefgo-tu-xuong-banh-nho-den-tham-vong-chuoi-lon-d428607.html