The Vietnam health supplement market: how big it is, where it sells, and the two approvals that set a launch date

A supplement brand looking at Vietnam usually meets the market figure first: about USD 2.9 billion in 2025, forecast to grow 9.2% a year to 2030, the fastest in Southeast Asia. The figure is real and comes from Euromonitor. It also counts herbal medicines, sports nutrition and weight management products, and a brand selling vitamins or fish oil competes in a category roughly a third of that size.

The launch date is set elsewhere. Vietnam treats health supplements more strictly than cosmetics: each product needs a registered declaration before it can be sold, and each ad needs its content confirmed before it can run. Both are short on paper and longer in practice, and both have to be on the plan before any media is booked.

This piece sets out what the figures measure, what the official register shows about competition, where supplements are bought, the two approvals, what an ad may say, and how to build a launch calendar backwards from them.

How big is the market? Three figures that measure different things

The second row is derived, and the derivation is simple. The same publication gives digestive health as the largest vitamins and supplements category, at USD 167.8 million and 17.3% of the segment, which puts the whole segment at about USD 970 million. Most of the remaining USD 1.9 billion is herbal and traditional products, which carry their own regulatory paths and compete on different ground.

That gap explains most of the disagreement in published figures. Report sellers publish numbers both well below and well above these, and coverage of the industry’s own conference in 2025 quoted one of them. Read the definition before the number. For a brand selling capsules of vitamins, minerals or fish oil, the market to size is the one around USD 1 billion, and the slice of it reachable in one price band and two channels is smaller again.

Euromonitor’s 2022 figure, about USD 2.4 billion, still circulates as a current one. Growth from there to 2025 works out at about 6–7% a year, consistent with the forecast published at the time.

What the official register says about competition

The Vietnam Food Administration publishes a spreadsheet of every health supplement declaration it has registered. By our count of the list covering 2018 to 31 May 2025, it has 72,766 rows, with between about 7,800 and 13,100 certificates issued in each year from 2019 to 2024. The list includes certificates later revoked or replaced, so it overstates what is on sale today. It still shows the scale of what a new product sits next to: thousands of registered products in every common category.

The industry association, VAFF, says the market had 11,814 products from 2,820 businesses in 2025, with 48.9% of the products imported. It gives no method, and the figure cannot be reconciled with the register, so treat it as the association’s view rather than a count.

On the supply side, the Minister of Health told the National Assembly in November 2024 that about 1,000 supplement manufacturers had been reduced to 201 meeting the production rules. That followed a run of counterfeit cases: in 2025 a former head of the Vietnam Food Administration was arrested over certifications linked to a fake supplement ring, and in January 2026 police charged the director of a company accused of selling hundreds of tons of counterfeit supplements between 2012 and 2025.

For a foreign brand, those cases cut both ways. Buyers have reason to check whether a product is genuine and registered, which favours an established foreign name. They also have reason to distrust anything bought outside a channel they recognise, which makes the choice of channel part of the product.

Where supplements are bought: the pharmacy counter first

Most supplement sales still happen in pharmacies. Euromonitor puts online sales at more than 20% of the category in 2025, up from a single-digit share in 2015.

The pharmacy channel is consolidating around chains. Long Châu reported 21,448 billion dong of revenue in the first half of 2026, up 33%, from 2,639 pharmacies and 236 vaccination centres. Pharmacity says it runs more than 1,100 stores, and An Khang 420. None of the three discloses how much of its revenue comes from supplements, so their size says where a brand can be seen, not how much it will sell.

Online, Metric’s figure of about 7,200 billion dong on the four main marketplaces in 2025 sits inside a health category that grew 46.89% that year. It does not include brand websites, pharmacy chains’ own apps, or sales closed in Zalo and Facebook chats.

Who buyers listen to matters as much as where they buy. In a 2025 survey sponsored by Herbalife, 84% of Vietnamese respondents said they took supplements regularly, but only 53% felt confident choosing one, and 66% named a health professional’s recommendation as a source. That recommendation happens at the counter or in a clinic. It cannot appear in an advertisement, as the next sections show, so a brand that depends on it needs a channel plan that reaches the counter, not only an ad plan.

The two approvals that set a launch date

Health supplements sit on a stricter path than cosmetics, whose advance ad approval was removed in February 2026. The rules below come from Decree 15/2018/ND-CP and Resolution 21/2026/NQ-CP. They are summarised for planning, not as legal advice.

For an imported product, the declaration file needs a certificate of free sale, export or health from the country of origin, legalised; a safety test report under 12 months old from a designated or ISO 17025 laboratory; scientific evidence for the claimed effect, with a daily dose at least 15% of the dose in that evidence; and a GMP or equivalent certificate, with notarised Vietnamese translations. It is filed by the organisation placing the product on the market, usually the importer.

That last point is commercial, not administrative. Whose name the declarations are in decides how easily the brand can change distributor later, and belongs in the distribution agreement.

The regime itself is also moving. A replacement for Decree 15 took effect in January 2026, caused a backlog of goods at ports in the weeks before Tết, and was suspended. The amended Food Safety Law is due for adoption in May 2027 at the earliest. A plan built on today’s rules should say which steps would change if the rules tighten.

What a supplement ad in Vietnam may say

The general rules are covered in Vietnam’s advertising law in 2026. For health supplements, five matter most:

• Only the confirmed content. The ad must match the uses in the registered declaration, and claims beyond them need scientific evidence in the confirmation file.
• Two fixed lines in Vietnamese. The phrase “Thực phẩm bảo vệ sức khỏe” (health supplement) and the warning that the product is not a medicine and does not replace one, in letters no smaller than the rest of the ad, and read aloud at the same speed and volume as the rest in audio.
• No disease claims. Vietnamese law bars any product that is not a drug from claiming to prevent, treat or relieve disease.
• No doctors, pharmacists or patients. Their images, uniforms, names and writing may not be used, and nor may patients’ thank-you letters.
• Creators carry duties too. Since January 2026, people who carry advertising must check the advertiser and the product documents, must not advertise a product they have not used or do not understand, and must disclose that the content is advertising. The brand remains responsible alongside them.

Platforms add their own layer without replacing the law. Meta limits supplement ads to people aged 18 or over and bans cure claims only for a fixed list of serious diseases, a narrower ban than Vietnam’s. TikTok asks advertisers in Vietnam for a supplement advertising licence. Shopee requires the ad confirmation and import documents before a supplement can be listed, and bans hand-carried supplements outright. An ad approved by a platform is not thereby legal.

The practical consequence for a foreign brand is that global creative rarely survives intact. A claim that a product supports heart health may be confirmable if it matches the declaration; a claim that it treats high cholesterol is a disease claim. A testimonial from a pharmacist in the home market cannot be used at all.

Your brand may already be on sale in Vietnam

Before planning a launch, check the marketplaces. Imported supplements bought abroad and resold are common, and they create two problems: a price reference the official launch has to live with, and a regulatory one.

Bringing supplements in for personal use is exempt from import inspection. Selling them is not. In May 2025 the Vietnam Food Administration told Lazada and Shopee to stop selling and remove several imported supplements, among them a Kirkland glucosamine and chondroitin product, because none had a registered declaration. In August 2026 it told Shopee to remove 11 health supplements whose registration numbers did not match its records.

For a brand, the question is which version of its products buyers can already find, at what price, and how the official launch will be told apart from it. That is easier to settle before launch, when where buyers compare and buy can still shape the plan, than after.

A worked example: a launch calendar built backwards

The schedule below is illustrative. A Japanese brand plans to launch three vitamin and fish oil products in Vietnam through an importer, with an official store on Shopee and TikTok Shop and a later listing in a pharmacy chain. Its media plan, built in Tokyo, books the first campaign for week 8.

At five working days a week, the first ad can run in about week 17, not week 8. If the media plan does not move, the first two months of budget either sit idle or run on content that was never confirmed. Each new claim added after launch, such as a second benefit or a new hero product, costs another 10 to 20 working days before it can be advertised.

None of these steps is expensive. The cost is time, and it falls on the part of the plan, the media calendar, that is usually written first. Building the calendar backwards from the approvals takes an afternoon and moves the board’s launch date to one that can be met.

Five things to settle before the launch

• The declarations. Who files them, in whose name, and what happens to them if the distribution agreement ends.
• The claims list. Which uses are in each declaration, which advertising claims follow from them, and which home-market claims will not travel.
• The confirmed ad set. Which ads will be confirmed before launch, and how often new claims will be added, so the creative plan runs on the confirmation calendar.
• The grey market. Which of your products are already sold in Vietnam, by whom, at what price.
• The channel order. Marketplaces first, pharmacies first, or both, decided on where the target buyer takes advice, not only on where volume is.

Where the figures in this article come from

• Euromonitor International, Consumer Health Market Data 2026, as published in Complementary Medicines Australia’s “2025 Industry Snapshot” (November 2025): market value, forecast, category scope, vitamins and dietary supplements categories, and the online share. The USD 1 billion segment estimate is our arithmetic from those shares. The 2022 figure is Euromonitor as reported by VnEconomy, 23 May 2025.
• Metric, “Báo cáo thị trường Thương mại Điện tử Việt Nam 2025”, January 2026: health category and supplement sales on four marketplaces. Dollar conversions at 26,300 dong are ours.
• Vietnam Food Administration: list of health supplement declarations registered from 2018 to 31 May 2025 (our count of its spreadsheet); its notices to Lazada and Shopee, as reported by Tuổi Trẻ on 27 May 2025 and Nhân Dân on 29 August 2026.
• VAFF (Vietnam Association of Functional Food), “25 năm ngành Thực phẩm chức năng Việt Nam”, November 2025. Minister of Health in the National Assembly, 11 November 2024, as reported by KTSG Online.
• Long Châu first-half 2026 results, CafeF, 29 July 2026; Pharmacity, LeapFrog Investments release, 27 May 2026; An Khang, CafeF, 28 July 2026.
• Herbalife Asia Pacific Responsible Supplement Use Survey 2025, as reported by Thị trường Tài chính Tiền tệ, 17 September 2025. Sponsored survey; the Vietnam sample size is not published.
• Enforcement: VnExpress International, 14 May 2025 and 20 January 2026.
• Regulation: Decree 15/2018/ND-CP, Articles 7, 8, 13, 26 and 27; Resolution 21/2026/NQ-CP; Decree 342/2025/ND-CP, Article 5; Law 75/2025/QH15 amending the Advertising Law; Pharmacy Law 2016, Article 6; Decree 37/2026/ND-CP, as summarised by EY Vietnam on 24 March 2026; suspension of Decree 46/2026, Việt Nam News, 9 February 2026, and Resolution 15/2026/NQ-CP; the amended Food Safety Law timetable, Dân trí, 24 September 2026. Platform policies of Meta, TikTok and Shopee, read on 15 October 2026.

The worked example uses invented numbers except where a source is named.

Where this work stops

MWY does not import, distribute or sell supplements, file product declarations or ad confirmations, or give legal advice, and takes no commission from importers, distributors, platforms, agencies or creators. Regulatory filings belong with counsel and specialist consultants in Vietnam.

What we do in Go-to-Market Strategy is put these steps into the entry plan before money is committed: the segment sized from the channel up, the claims the launch can make and what each requires, the channel order, the importer question, and a launch calendar that carries every approval as a dependency, so the first campaign date in the board pack is one the rules allow.