The high-value utilization of summer and autumn tea resources won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award

The project "Key Technology Innovation and Application for Quality Improvement, Transformation, and High-Value Utilization of Summer and Autumn Tea," led by Researcher Yin Junfeng of the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, won the second prize of the 2025 National Science and Technology Progress Award. Addressing the industry challenges of the strong bitterness and astringency of summer and autumn tea and its low utilization rate, this achievement established a three-tiered, progressive, synergistic utilization technology: "tea bitterness reduction and astringency removal - targeted quality improvement of tea juice - efficient purification of tea functional components." The technology has been applied in more than 50 key tea-producing counties across the country. In the past three years, 15 major application enterprises have generated an additional 48.133 billion yuan in benefits, increased the utilization of summer and autumn tea by more than 300,000 tons, and increased the average income of tea farmers in demonstration application areas by more than 2,000 yuan per mu.