Summary To prevent the adulteration of agricultural resources and provide a solution to enhance the green coffee bean supply chain, authentication using the near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technique was investigated. Partial least square with discrimination analysis (PLS‐DA) models combined with various preprocessing methods were built from NIR spectra of 153 Vietnamese green coffee samples. The model combined with the standard normal variate and the first order of derivative yielded excellent performance in predicting coffee species with the error cross‐validation of 0.0261. PLS‐DA model of mean centre and first‐order derivative spectra also yielded good performance in verifying geographical indication of green coffee with the error of 0.0656. By contrast, the predicting abilities of post‐harvest methods were poor. The overall results showed a high potential of the NIRS in online authentication practices.