Two students turn a sidewalk banh mi cart into a 500-cart chain and $2M yearly sales

In 2015 Doan Van Minh Nhut, a 22-year-old graduate of HCMC's University of Economics, turned down the multinational job path and chose the sidewalk, the same trade his mother had worked in An Giang. With university senior Ho Duc Hai he created Banh Mi Ma Hai: eight carts in District 10, each costing about 3 million VND, staffed by 30 students earning a little money for three morning hours.

The carts paid for themselves in under two months at more than 100 loaves a day. Early on the founders absorbed the cost of informality — monthly fines to reclaim confiscated carts, protection-money shakedowns that forced them to relocate — until, within a year, the fleet had grown to 40 carts and hundreds of employees. They registered a company and moved from running everything themselves to franchising.

The franchise is the actual innovation. After COVID crushed sales, the founders cut the package from 22 million to 7.5 million VND, removed profit from setup, and made money by supplying the fishcake filling, sauce and ingredients instead. The product was deliberately simple — bread, fishcake, sauce, pickles — so training and quality stayed controllable at scale.

By 2023 the brand counted nearly 500 carts across 37 provinces, jobs for thousands, and about US$2 million in annual sales; by mid-2024 it reported over 1,000 franchise partners, 80% of them ordinary workers including housewives and people made unemployed by the pandemic. A sidewalk business had become a formal, investable chain.