Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Vietnam - Survey finds 30 percent of coffee in Vietnam has no caffeine

If you are loyal customers of sidewalk cafés in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, there is real probability that you have been sipping the favorite drink with almost no caffeine.

More than 30 percent of the coffee consumed daily in four Vietnamese provinces and cities have an insignificant content of caffeine, the Vietnam Standard and Consumers Association (Vinastas) announced Thursday, citing findings from its latest survey.

Most of the coffee with a poor caffeine content is served at sidewalk and small-sized cafés, according to the survey, which examined 253 black coffee samples taken from Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and the southern provinces of Binh Duong and Soc Trang between June and July.

The samples were randomly taken from coffee shops at different places, including coffeehouses, small-sized cafés, hospital canteens, sidewalk cafés and mobile coffee carts, according to Vinastas.

The survey indicated that 30.04 percent of the taken samples have a caffeine content of less than one gram per liter. Five samples were found having no caffeine at all.

The no-caffeine coffee is mostly served at all of the serving places surveyed, except for the standard coffeehouses, according to the survey.

More alarmingly, of the number of coffee cups sold by the mobile carts, hospital canteens and sidewalk café, those with little or no caffeine content accounted for as much as 47.54 percent.

Vuong Ngoc Tuan, deputy general secretary of Vinastas, said the survey only looks into the low-cost segment of coffee consumption in those localities.

“We will survey more locations in the coming time,” he told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper. “We will also examine other quality parameters rather than just the caffeine content.”

A cup of coffee that has no caffeine obviously means it is in fact a mixture of different chemicals which are greatly harmful to drinker health.

Vietnam’s overall coffee production remains unchanged at 29.3 million bags (60kg each) in the 2015-16 marketing year (MY), the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in its ‘Vietnam: Coffee Annual’ report released last month.

The Vietnamese coffee production for MY2016/17 is forecast at 27.3 million bags, a seven percent drop compared to that of MY2015/16 due to adverse weather conditions, El Nino and possibly followed by the La Nina phenomenon, according to the report seen by Tuoi Tre News.



You can find older posts regarding ASEAN politics and economics news at SBC blog, and older posts regarding health and healthcare at IIMS blog. I thank you.

No comments:

Post a Comment