Pre-Cut Soup Vegetable Kit

The pre-cut soup vegetable kit launched in 2020, as more families began cooking at home but still had little time for preparation. Each tray makes a complete pot of soup for two to three people: peeled vegetables cut to the right size and a concentrated soup seasoning sachet made in-house by Thalvora. All the cook needs to add is water, and meat or prawns if they wish.

Four recipes

• Mixed vegetable soup: chayote, carrot, potato, cabbage, spring onion and coriander.
• Pumpkin soup: pumpkin, spring onion and sawtooth coriander.
• Choy sum and ginger soup: choy sum, julienned ginger and spring onion.
• Vegetarian sour soup: tomato, okra, giant taro stem and bean sprouts, with a tamarind seasoning sachet.

Where the vegetables come from

All vegetables come from our Duc Trong sourcing area in Lam Dong, farmed to VietGAP standards and QR-coded by bed. Our sourcing planners set planting schedules from weekly sales forecasts, so growers know in advance how much will be bought and less produce goes to waste.

Preparation at the Duc Trong plant

• Intake: vegetables harvested in the morning reach the plant within two hours and are pre-cooled to 4–6 °C.
• Washing and peeling: root vegetables are brush-washed and peeled; leafy greens are washed three times in chilled, filtered water.
• Cutting: machines cut each vegetable to a size set for its recipe so everything cooks at the same rate, for example 5 mm slices of carrot and chayote.
• Drying and assembly: each component is weighed and placed in its own compartment so the leaves are not crushed.
• Sealing: trays are film-sealed in a clean room at 6–8 °C, with the seasoning sachet in a separate compartment.

The seasoning sachet

The 15 g sachet is made in the seasonings area of our Binh Duong plant. Daikon, onion, mushrooms and sweetcorn are simmered for four hours, strained, vacuum-concentrated at 60 °C and blended with sea salt and rock sugar. It contains no added MSG and no preservatives, is hot-filled into foil sachets and keeps for 12 months at ambient temperature.

Quality control

The Duc Trong plant operates under HACCP and ISO 22000:2018. Wash water is checked for microbiology every shift, and finished trays are tested for temperature, sensory quality and microbiology by lot. Trays travel in refrigerated trucks at 2–4 °C, reaching Ho Chi Minh City the same day and Hanoi via the Bac Ninh distribution centre within 30 hours.

Storage and cooking

Keep the tray refrigerated at 2–4 °C and use within four days of packing. To cook, bring 1 litre of water to the boil, stir in the seasoning, add the root vegetables first for eight to ten minutes, then the leafy greens and herbs for the final one to two minutes. Add 150–200 g of minced pork, prawns or tofu if you like, and adjust the seasoning before serving.

Traceability

The QR code on the tray shows the growing bed for each vegetable, the harvest and packing dates, and the batch of the enclosed seasoning sachet. Trays left unsold before their use-by date are collected by Thalvora and composted for our growing areas.