Practicable approach to drying factors for herbal and fruit infusions raw materials and composed products

摘要

Herbal and Fruit Infusions (HFl) on the European market cover a range of several hundred plant species. Only a fraction of these is sourced by cultivation. Also cultivated HFl plants originate from a wide variety of geographic origins. The dry matter and water content at the moment of harvest are subject to a plethora of influencing factors and thus may vary from origin to origin, from year to year and from grower to grower (implicating, e.g., different cultivars), to mention but a few factors. It is evident that this results in a considerable variability of the raw agricultural commodities.For obvious reasons it is not practicable at all to establish specific drying factors even for the empirically most common commodity-active substance combinations observed in industry and enforcement practice. Therefore, default drying factors are the only practicable and appropriate approach both for single ingredient- and composed products. Considering the experience of its members as well as the available published evidence, THIE recommends a default drying factor of 5 for HFl ingredients/products.