Caffeine

[David90]

Why do manufacturers not have to declare the amount of caffeine in soft drinks, tea , coffee etc ?

[Smowball]

Don't know but I wish they did more caffeine free drinks though.

[Buenchico]

The EU and HM Government presumably think that most people are intelligent enough to know that tea, coffee and cola all contain caffeine, so there's little point adding a figure to it. However foods and drinks which are particularly high in caffeine DO have to be labelled:
https://www.food.gov.uk/science/additives/energydrinks

In my opinion (and despite have high blood pressure) any drink which doesn't contain either alcohol or caffeine simply isn't worth consuming!

[ummmm]

Like water, Chris?

[Elina]

Buen, that did make me laugh!

[Buenchico]

Ummmm:
The number of glasses of water (without anything else in it) that I've consumed in my sixty-odd years probably doesn't even reach double figures.

[theprof]

As far as tea and coffee are concerned, it's because most tea and coffee is blended from true varieties. In the case of tea, it's Assam, Darjeeling and others. Coffee can be a blend of Colombian, Ethiopian and a whole lot of others. All these different varieties contain different amounts of caffeine. On top of this, your average spoonful of Nescafe and Gold Blend etc is subject to the whims of the Nestle blender, which means that the caffeine level will differ between batches. This means the true caffeine level can never be calculated with any accuracy.

The FSA and European authorities accept this difficulty and have never insisted on disclosure of caffeine levels in blended coffee. If some individual manufacturers want to try to provide a figure, they won't stop them.

Caffeine disclosure for soft drinks is not necessary under current regulations with the exception that Buenchico has mentioned above.

[theprof]

My university laboratories can provide you with caffeine levels in any type of coffee or tea within a few minutes. I'll not go into details, but the analysis doesn't come cheap. Factoring the cost up for coffee and tea blenders would mean it would be prohibitively expensive for them as all batches would vary in caffeine content.

They simply can't afford to do it. There's a reason why they call themselves coffee blenders and tea blenders on the packaging.