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.
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