German green tea supplement brand tigovit highlights women’s health benefits, enters US market
Its minimalist box features no health claims, an echo of the EU’s stringent requirements for adding health claims on supplement products.
But the packaging does highlight the supplement’s key active ingredient—EGCG extracted from green tea. Researchers have linked this bioactive component of green tea to health benefits such as cognitive decline prevention and weight management.
According to Katja Dietze, the Florida-based exclusive distributor for tigovit products in the US, the product fits squarely in the supplement categories of healthy aging, women’s health, and weight management.
“As we noticed and experience in Germany, many informed consumers are seeking a green tea product like tigovit that is highly controlled from the moment it is picked, through the processing and the packaging,” Dietze told NutraIngredients-USA.
Having lived in the US for years, Dietze saw stateside market opportunity for tigovit as consumers here may be drawn to the ‘Made in Germany’ aspect of the product.
“The thoroughness with which the raw materials in tigovit are selected, the meticulousness of the production of tigovit in Germany and the quality controls of the independent German laboratories that continuously test tigovit are just some of the reasons that make this product unique and special,” she said.
Increased bioavailability with piperine and vitamin-C
EGCG is found naturally in green tea, but to get the therapeutic dose that researchers have observed in different studies would mean drinking large amounts of green tea.
“It is not only impractical, it is also not an efficient way to absorb EGCG,” Dietze said.
tigovit is formulated with black pepper-derived piperine (using Sabinsa’s BioPerine) and vitamin C (Ester-C), two nutrients that have been linked to increasing the body’s absorption of EGCG in a 2011 study by University of Heidelberg researcher Derliz Mereles, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.
“I developed tigovit to improve the oral bioavailability of EGCG in humans,” founder Tanja Hohenester told NutraIngredients-USA. Though the two carrier ingredients are branded, the EGCG itself has no patented name. It comes from an organic-certified tea garden in China, Hohenester said.
She founded tigovit around five years ago. In an interview with German website Fempreneur, Hohenester explained that she founded the company after exploring non-surgical ways to treat a fibroid—a non-cancerous growth in the uterus.
“On the internet, I found a green tea study in which women could positively influence the growth of fibroids,” she said in the interview.
Since then, highlighting the product’s potential benefits in the women's health realm became a key part of the product’s positioning.
“We are sponsoring a small study at the University in Berlin for uterine fibroid,” she told us. “The first data will be available in July of this year.”
