Preliminary Statistical study of green tea food supplements consumption in Syria

Abstract

Food supplements manufactured from green tea are not familiar to many consumers in Syria. Therefore, a database and preliminary information can contribute to ​​manufacturing and marketing success of these food supplements, this stage is called the preliminary study. An electronic questionnaire was designed using Google Drive^© and distributed online via email and social media from 31 August to 26 October 2018, when the acceptable minimum of answers was exceeded. IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0 program was used to process the results after their coding and classifying.

The results show that many participants use food supplements of various kinds, but a very few use food supplements made from green tea. The consumers rely mainly on what they read or hear about the benefits of these supplements. Besides, the majority of them are willing to use the original natural source of the food supplements, which is in this case the green tea. On the other hand, most participants who do not use this type of food supplements have not been aware of their presence in the market or prefer to drink tea instead of using it as a dietary supplement. Based on this preliminary study, it is possible to predict the possibility of marketing a product containing green tea extract with high EGCG content (one of the most important polyphenols in tea) as a dietary supplement in the future.