Farmers from northern province of Hung Yen are earning huge profits from opening rice porridge or chao shops for children in Hanoi.
Doan Dao Commune has seen dramatic improvements thanks to chao
Earning from children’s meals
Shop owners coming from Hung Yen Province’s Phu Cu District have made a living selling the rice dish to youngsters for years.
Nguyen Thi Ba, who have supplied chao for five years on Hanoi’s Khuat Duy Tien Street, is always busy.
Ba lived in Phu Cu District’s Doan Dao Commune. She has three children, her family used to be very poor, she then worked in Haiphong as a server in a chao shop, where she learnt how to cook the dish.
She became the first woman to make a living from the area in Hanoi after she came to the city to look after a sick relative who needed her as a home helper. Every morning, Ba made the time consuming chao for the family’s two year-old baby. Her talent for the dish became well known in the apartment block and soon she was cooking dishes for many of the local youngsters.
Thanks to her experience, Ba rented a small shop and rapidly became a popular eating place.
Ba said she always bought rice and foods with clear labelling, and her devotion to quality has given her a loyal customer base.
For the first two years, she opened two branches on Hang Than Street and near Viet Hung Urban Area. These three shops each month give her an average income of VND45 million (USD2,149).
“Hot” job
Other people in Phu Cu Commune gradually followed Ba.
Nguyen Van Tuan, another chao shop owner in Long Bien District’s Ngoc Thuy Ward shared, “Many people in Doan Dao and Dinh Cao Communes have come to Hanoi to sell chao. They used to be servers in chao shops in Haiphong. During their work, they learnt how to cook different varieties of the dish.”
People in Phu Cu District have shared their experiences as a way of escaping poverty. Now hundreds of people from Doan Dao and Doan Cao Communes have left for Hanoi to open their own chao shops.
Poor village fares well
Most of the villagers are originally from Dong Cap and Cho Cap. Vu Van Long, head of Dong Cap Village said he’d lost count of the number of people who’d taken up the job. In his village, there are 350 households, but a quarter of them have come to Hanoi to open or serve in chao shops, and there are households which have entirely moved to Hanoi.
Long referred to the huge changes in the village. Many households can now build new houses and buy expensive motorbikes after selling chao in Hanoi for just 4-5 years.
A chao shop owned by a Doan Dao woman
