Tea is an agricultural product of the leaves, tea buds and inter-nodes of the Camellia sinensis plant. This study was done to estimate caffeine in different types of decaffeinated tea and coffee brands available in Pakistan’s market by High Performance Liquid Chromatography. In this study standard calibration curve of caffeine produced a straight line (R2 = 0.999). . The 0.2% w/v PQC was used and showed retention time of caffeine at 8.665 minutes and IS at 5.337. It was estimated that 0.1807% caffeine present in the positive quality control which provide the mean of the reliability of the performance of the procedure. Total of six brands comprising of 30 decaffeinated samples were selected for the estimation of caffeine. Among all only four (ABS 3, 24, 27 and 28) produced no peak of analyte representing complete decaffeinated product. Possibly, limited sensitivity of instrument may have produced these results but, these are the brands that contain much lesser amount of caffeine as compare to the other brands. Among all 30 decaffeinated samples only (ABS 19) has observed the maximum 0.03% of caffeine and the minimum quantity of caffeine 0.0001% in one sample (ABS 23) was estimated.
Caffeine; Coffee; Tea; Pakistan; High Performance Liquid Chromatography.
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