With the Mid-Autumn Festival drawing near, the mooncake market is bustling in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. People can find a wide array of cakes with all sorts of flavors and eye-catching design and packaging.

This year new brands have made an appearance alongside familiar names to offer a broader range of choices to customers.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the "Children's Festival" in Vietnam, is celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, which falls on Sep 17 this year.

Mooncakes are commonly given as a gift during the festival.

This year KIDO Group Corporation, a Vietnam-based company engaging in the food processing industry, offers mooncakes under two brands, KIDO's Bakery and Tho Phat, the latter a newbie in the market.

Tho Phat offers traditional mooncakes with fillings like green bean, taro, lotus seeds, coconut milk, lap cheong sausage and roasted chicken, while KIDO's Bakery uses premium ingredients such as abalone, shark fin, Alaska shrimp, and scallops.

Phuong Diem Thuan Bakery based in Ho Chi Minh City is filled with customers these days.

Phuong Trien Phong, its owner, said people started buying mooncakes in early August, one to two weeks earlier than normal.

The bakery is selling 18 varieties this year, and mooncakes with pineapple, taro, lotus seed paste and juice of panda leaf are the top sellers, he said. For the first time, it is selling mooncakes with a scallop and XO sauce filling.

Thanh Long Bakery, one of the oldest mooncake producers in Ho Chi Minh City, is offering eight new mooncake box designs.

Hoang Ngoc Thanh, its sales director, said a distinctive feature of Thanh Long's mooncakes is that it produces and processes the main ingredients using traditional family recipes, giving the cakes a unique and pure flavor.

According to market players, with people's health awareness increasing, they have launched low-sugar, vegan and gluten-free mooncakes.

Co.op Bakery has launched a new mooncake line with both vegetarian and meat options. The fresh mooncakes are handcrafted by skilled artisans using natural ingredients and without preservatives priced from 50,900 Vietnamese dong (about $2) per piece.

Central Retail in Vietnam is selling 19 mooncake varieties at prices ranging from 29,000 to 99,000 Vietnamese dong per piece, equivalent to 240,000 to 500,000 Vietnamese dong per box.

Nguyen Thi Bich Van, head of communications at Central Retail in Vietnam, said a new feature of the mooncakes is that, besides being affordable, they also contain 30 percent less sugar compared to last year and minimal quantities of preservatives.

With the rise of e-commerce, in addition to traditional brick-and-mortar stores and modern retail outlets, consumers can also order mooncakes from a variety of brands and have them delivered to their doorstep on popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopee, Lazada, Tiki, Grab, and the TikTok Shop.

According to mooncake producers, though the prices of inputs have increased significantly this year, they have only hiked mooncake prices slightly amid the economic downturn.