Flavored tea has a tradition

Tea with natural flavors

Tea with natural flavors

Tea with artificial flavors

If your tea says it has natural flavoring, then the blend contains either essential oils, such as lavender, orange, or bergamot oil; aromatic plant parts, such as lavender, hibiscus, or rose petals; dried fruit pieces, such as rosehip peel or apple, orange, or lemon pieces; and spices such as cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, or ginger.

In the list of ingredients you will find natural flavors listed by name.

If the packaging says "natural flavorings," then the flavoring still has a natural origin. Sometimes only in the remotest sense. So-called natural flavorings and flavor extracts are obtained from existing plant or animal raw materials, either through distillation or extraction.

Distillation and extraction produce a concentrated mixture of flavorings that are already present in the starting material. If flavors are created through biotechnological processes (enzymatic or microbiological) from other natural starting materials, such as vanilla flavoring from cellulose, then they are called "natural flavoring type vanilla."

These flavorings do not use any naturally occurring raw material. Artificial flavorings are produced using synthetic processes in a test tube. Either a substance that already exists in nature, such as vanilla or peppermint flavoring, is reproduced.

Their molecular structure then corresponds to the model from nature. Or the substance does not occur in nature and is specially developed as a flavor.

An example would be ethyl vanillin, which is 2-3 times more intense than vanillin.