Lyons was chosen for the extravaganza because it has the largest Vietnamese population of any city in France, said the Mayor of Lyon’s District 7 in a speech at the launch ceremony.The majority of France’s 400,000 strong Vietnamese population call Lyons home, said the mayor, and the city has had a long-established, broad-based and highly beneficial sister-city relationship with HCM City. Casino Group officials said the supermarket has sold Vietnamese food and foodstuffs for many years.Last year the store carried on average 800 different items at any one time, all of which were imported from Vietnam, they said, with annual sales hitting a modest US$30 million.With the advent of the sweeping EU-Vietnam free trade agreement erasing import tariffs on 99% of all goods traded between the two economies, the Casino Group leaders said they are now looking for sales to really take off.
We can’t put an exact finger on it, but we believe the new free trade deal could be worth tens of millions in sales of Vietnamese food products in France alone and that is why we launched this large-scale promotion.Our long term strategy, they said, is too market a full range of Vietnamese food and foodstuffs across the entire spectrum of the EU market.This, one of our largest retail promotion efforts ever, was only made possible by the close cooperation of the Vietnam Embassy in France and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said Casino leaders.