Tea as a most popular beverage

by Sammy Eklund, April 2015

900 words

3 pages

essay

“If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you” (William E. Gladstone).

Tea is the second most widely consumed beverage in the world, exceeded only by water, which is the most necessary of all liquids. Tea is an integral part of everyday social life in many of the world’s most populous countries. This has made tea the most popular beverage for a huge amount of people in the world.

While working as an intern at the Williams Russell agency, I got a new account of a bottled “Leafs Alive” tea that uses a healthy antioxidant formulation. As I know that the sales of the bottled tea, as well as other healthy products, have increased, so that the tea segment accounted more than 50 percent of the market share in measured channels and showed the largest growth from 2009 to 2011 at 19.2 percent (Beverage Industry, 2012), I have decided to analyze tea market in order to find out what consumer trends seem to drive this product development and what cultural, social, psychological, and behavioral factors influence this market. Let us look closer on these issues.

The word tea refers to the leaves or flower buds of the shrub Camellia Sinesis, however, the infusions can be made from steeping any leaves, berries, flowers, roots, barks or seeds in boiling water.

There is no secret that tea is good for health. The tea leaves contain chemicals called polyphenols, which give tea its antioxidant properties. Polyphenols in tea have been known to help protect cells from free radicals and damaging physiological process known as “oxidative stress”; prevent blood clotting; lower cholesterol levels; deactivate cancer promoters; stimulate the immune system.

Mendel Friedman and his co-workers from Universities in the South Korea investigated tea's ability to induce cell death in human cancer cells using either water or alcoholic extract of tea and found out that it inhibits tumor growth, though at different levels dictated by the concentration of the tea extract (Sade Oguntola, 2007).

People who drink tea regularly may reduce the risk of the two most common types of skin cancer as the antioxidants found in tea may help to protect the skin against damage from UV radiation. Those who drank one or more cups of tea each day were 20 percent to 30 percent less likely to develop basal cell or squamous cell carcinoma compared with those who did not drink tea.

Tea also has fluoride for strong teeth, virtually no calories, and half the amount of caffeine found in an equally-sized cup of coffee. Tea also includes theanine (an amino acid unique to tea), vitamins, minerals, and methylxanthines. These are the components that are the source of the healthful properties of tea, which help fight against mutagenic agents, delay aging, fight high blood pressure, improve the functions of the digestive and excretory systems.

Researchers discovered that people who said that they had consumed tea regular for …

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