Effect of Tea bag materials on physical and chemical quality parameters of Black Tea during storage
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
The tea (Camellia sinensis) produced in Sri Lanka is popular as “Ceylon tea” and has a higher demand
as ‘best quality tea’ in the international trade. Packing tea into bags in many forms has become very
popular because of convenience and it can be considered as an effective form of value addition.
Though tea bags are used as packaging strategy in order to protect the quality parameters of tea during
storage, while extending the shelf life, there are many quality claims against tea bag materials. The
other bad news is that paper tea bags may be just as bad, or worse, than the plastic ones because many
of them are treated with epichlorohydrin, a compound mainly used in the production of epoxy resins.
The purpose of this research was to evaluate effect of different types of tea bag packaging materials
on physical and chemical parameters of tea and selecting best tea bag packaging material.
Methodology
There are three types of tea bag materials as Paper, Soilon and Nylon that used to export tea in Sri
Lanka, were used for this research. Those tea bags contained black tea with same manufacturing date,
and also they were received from same tea exporting company. Each tea bag was consisting with
Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings (BOPF) grade of black tea and tea bags were in same shape, size and
same weight (2.5g) of tea. Each type of tea bag was packed in same size of sealed cardboard boxes
and they were stored in normal room temperature. Each box was consisted with 25 tea bags.
Tea bags were stored for three months duration. Every experiment was conducted three times at same
time intervals in each month of during storage period and data was collected in each month.
Experiments were conducted using selected physical and chemical quality parameters of black tea.
Moisture content, dry matter, brightness, total colour were measure as physical quality parameters
and total polyphenols, caffeine, thearubigin, theaflavin and thearubigin to theaflavin ratio was
measured as chemical quality parameters. Three replicates were carried out for each type of materials
in each experiment. Every experiment was conducted according to ISO procedures recommended for
black tea.
All data were expressed using descriptive statistics as means, standard deviations and coefficient of
variations of triplicate measurements and analysed by using Minitab 16 software. Significant effects
were tested by conducting two sample t-tests for each packaging materials by comparing with the
initial data set of each material separately. Values of P<0.05 were considered as significantly different
(α=0.05).
Description
Keywords
Agriculture, Export Agriculture, Tea Industrials, Tea Technology, Black Tea