Taipei, June 17 (CNA) A technique for determining the origin of tea that has been in place for several years was used to help break a recent case of Vietnamese tea being passed off as Taiwanese tea, according to an agriculture official.
Though the technique, developed by the Council of Agriculture (COA), has been around for some time, it might not be well-known around Taiwan, said Juang Lao-dar, deputy head of the COA's Agriculture and Food Agency.
It is one of the three methods used by the COA to ensure the authentic origin of tea products, he said. The other two involve a QR-Code tracking system and checking the colors of tea in the same batch.
The main method that helped break the Vietnamese tea case uses inorganic element analysis to determine the tea's origin, with tea samples being burned and the remaining inorganic minerals being analyzed, Juang said.
Those minerals come from the soil where the tea trees are grown, and because the soil in each different region has different minerals, identifying them can determine the origin of the tea, Juang said.
Inorganic analysis technology has been effective in identifying the true origin of teas and used to help break fraud cases involving foreign tea that was falsely labeled as Taiwanese, including in the latest case in Nantou County.
Investigators there uncovered a case of a tea farmer importing 5,418 kilograms of tea from Vietnam in 2015 at a price of NT$600 (US$19.75) per kg and then using local tea cooperative members to pass it off as high-end Taiwanese tea.
The farmer had the coop members enter the Vietnamese tea as a locally grown premium oolong tea in a competition held in the county, and about 50 percent of the Vietnamese tea provided by Lai earned awards in the competition, investigators said.
The prize-winning tea was then sold at between NT$1,667 and NT$4,667 per kg, the Investigation Bureau's Nantou office said.
The office said it was tipped off about such fraudulent activity in late 2015, but it did not come up with hard evidence until it used the COA technology to determine the tea's true origin.
