Will Jivcoff

Noodle Factories — Can Tho, Vietnam

Around 5:30am, I boarded an old longboat with a loud, smelly motor and headed down the Mekong River. As the sun rose to my back, I headed in the direction of a small village on the south-eastern periphery of Can Tho where I’d planned to check out a bunch of noodle factories. After weaving through the floating markets and turning off onto a lush, comparatively quiet inlet, we arrived at a row of small ‘factories’ made of tin siding which populated the river bank.

Inside, it was a very different world. The already warm morning was 10 degrees hotter indoors and more humid still, steam from the boiler making the air damp and hazy while Vietnamese techno-pop blasted from speakers caked in damp rice flour.

Each factory is owned by a local family and production is largely overseen by the different generations of women. There were roughly 4–6 people working at each one, and every factory came with a warm welcome: big smiles, cookies and candy, invitations to test the fresh noodles, and an unexpected amount of dancing. It was clear that the workers here in the village are a tight-knit community.

As morning turned into early afternoon, the production processes changed over rapidly — signified by rigorous cleaning of the machines — to accommodate different noodle styles. Not all noodles are equal! Whether it’s the classic flat phở, round bún tuoi, or chewy cao lầu, each noodle style has a different cooking process and recipe that it ends up in. With precision and speed, everything would get weighed out, tossed into bags, and shipped into the city by mini-truck or scooter to be served the same day.