White shrimp has become a major export product for Vietnam in recent years due to the fact that upgrading structures for white shrimp production is part of the Vietnamese development strategy. However, the sector suffers from various sustainability issues that hinder development and contribute to soil and water pollution. This article aims to explore production systems for white shrimp in the central Vietnamese Thua Thien Hue province and outline existing sustainability issues as well as possible approaches to address them. Thus, an explorative study, in which primary data was collected from semi-structured interviews with 24 respondents including white shrimp farmers, local government representatives, and white shrimp buyers, was conducted. In addition, secondary data such as documents and statistics were used. This study identified inconsistent seed quality, low professional expertise among smallholders, high dependence of smallholders on middlemen and diminishing water quality as major challenges that constrain further development in the sector. In the current study, the underlying reasons for those issues lie in high informality of relationships, low access of smallholders to capital and generally weak implementation of existing regulations and standards were all under argument. These issues need to be addressed in order to enable further development in the white shrimp sector.