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Bottled Water

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Bottled Beverages: Water (2700 words)
By Chad Staddon & Andrew Fox

British Bottled Water Producers Ltd boasts that the United Kingdom bottled water market, including

water coolers, has grown from 580 million litres in 1993 to almost 2.2 billion litres in 2007, or approximately

40 litres per person per year. In the US total annual sales of bottled water in 2008 was over 30 billion litres,

having more than doubled in only a decade. Averaged out, each man, woman and child in America

consumers approximately 100 litres of water costing more per unit volume than gasoline. Worldwide growth

has been even more explosive, posting year-on-year growth of more than 7%/year and more than a dozen

countries, including Mexico, France and Italy – consume even more per capita. This makes bottled water

the fastest growing bottled beverage in the world and a very hot marketing proposition indeed.

Given the above, it is not surprising that large corporations such as Nestlé, Pepsico, Danone and

Coca Cola have entered the bottled water

Table 1 UK bottled water brand market share industry making acquisitions of various bottled
(by value)
Evian (Danone) 9.7% water brands or launching their own with exotic

Volvic (Danone) 7.3% sounding names like “Aqua Fina” (Pepsico) and
Powwow (Nestlé in bottled water coolers) 7.2% “Dasani” (Coca Cola), as well as those listed,
Highland Spring 6.9%
alongside their market share, in Table 1. From a
Buxton (Nestlé) 3%
corporate point of view it is a near-perfect product
Aqua Pura (Princes) 2%
because, as the chairman of the board of the
Strathmore 2%
Source: Zenith International (March 2005) cited in Perrier Corporation once said, "It struck me . . .
British Bottled Water Producers Ltd, 2008.
that all you had to do is take the water out of the

ground and then sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or, for that matter, oil”.

In addition to the “basic” bottled water products, many companies are seeking to add value to water

in the following ways:

- through the introduction of additives intended to make water more nutritional. So-called
“Vitamin waters” and flavoured waters have become the latest variant of bottled water
products, primarily being developed by Coca-Cola and Nestle. Aimed at the style and
health conscious 18-35 AB demographic these “functional waters” claim to promote health
and sports performance.
- through increasingly complex (and expensive) packaging. The epitome of this “Bling”
water, which is contained in a rhinestone-encrusted bottle designed by Swarovski and
retails for US$40/litre.
- by the creation of a distinction between basic and “premium” water. In March 2007 the first
industry conference “Towards the Creation of a Premium Water Society” was held in
Barcelona, with the specific objective developing strategies for enlarging the gulf between
tap water and bottled water.
The bottled water industry has also developed a market for so called “premium” waters. Such brands

include 'Berg', from Canadian glaciers and sold for £30 per bottle in hotels, and 'Peteroa 9500' from Chile,

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which is marketed on the basis that it has been “filtered through glaciers” over 9500 years and “Fiji”, which

touts its sources as among the most pristine (because so far away) in the world. Yet, such waters are

shipped thousands of miles accross the world incurring huge carbon footprints – which cannot be good since

an alternative is readily available, in the developed world at least. These waters are now increasingly

evaluated in much the same way as fine wines would be described at a wine tasting, leading to the

publication of the first connoisseurs guide to ”fine waters” in 2006. Yet attempts by candidates in blind taste

tests, which have included hotel sommeliers from the likes of Claridges and The Dorchester, to distinguish

between bottled and tap waters using such criteria as “palate”, “nose” and “virginality” have inevitably failed.

Notwithstanding this fact, it is a standard part of many restaurants business model to push higher margin

bottled waters on customers, raking in between $200 and $350 million per annum from bottled water sales

alone but also triggering an “ask for tap” backlash in the UK.

Bottled Water: Health, Safety & the Environment

One researcher traces our enthusiasm for mineral and spring waters back to the spas of Vichy-les-

Bains in 16th century France, a practice which then developed into the drinking of such waters in the 18th

century; what used to be called “taking the cure”. Many bottled water brands base their publicity on the

advertised “purity” of their product. In this regard public health messages about drinking at least 2 litres of

water each day appear to have been hijacked by bottled water companies seeking to portray their products

as the only safe way of meeting this by now well-recognised healthy living requirement. Some dieticians

warn that this form of advertising could in fact spur rates of obesity and hypoglycaemia since so many

bottled water products, include “Vitamin Water”, have added sweeteners. Moreover around a third of our

daily intake of water comes from water which is contained in our food, particularly from fruit and vegetables,

as part of a normal balanced diet and there is no specific benefit to drinking plain water. Of course bottled

water is still consumed by many for its supposed purity and nourishment but has also been marketed as a

must have fashion accessory aimed at the 15 to 34 social class AB demographic so prized by marketing

executives. In this regard it is useful that product differentiation can be effected through expensive

packaging and slight tweaks (addition of enhancements, however dubious) to what is essentially still the

same stuff that comes out of most of our taps.

Bottled water companies have also been involved with safety scares and product recalls, which

have, perhaps strangely, done nothing to slow the growth of the industry. The most recent recall was in 2004

in the UK when Coca-Cola’s “Dasani” brand was found to contain up to 22 parts per billion (ppb) of Bromate,

a known carcinogen (BBC, 2004). Another substance commonly found in many bottled water varieties is

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sodium, a recognised contributing factor to hypertension and coronary heart disease. Although sodium is

usually only found in trace quantities in bottled water, it has been found to be as high as 18 mg/l in “Fiji”

water, one of the world’s best-selling waters – near to the maximum guide level in the EU (cf. WATER

TREATMENT). Other bottled water samples have been found to be relatively high in sulphates, nitrates,

phosphates and other pollutants. Indeed, the French government advises people who drink bottled mineral

water to change brands frequently, because the minerals in particular brands may be harmful in high doses

or if consumed over a long period. Further, the National Resources Defence Council found that in a third of

bottled water samples tested, there was at least one sample which violated state limits and guidelines.

More recently a new menace has been uncovered, emanating not from the product but from the

container within which it is packaged. The manufacture of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles which

are commonly used for soft drinks including bottled water is carried out using a heavy metal called antimony.

This causes PET bottles to contain several hundred milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg), compared to less than

1 mg/kg in typical rocks and soils. In a test carried out at the University of Heidelberg in Germany on 63

Canadian and European bottled water brands there was no sample which exceeded guidelines, however the

researcher commented that “in Japan, PET is manufactured using titanium, which is effectively insoluble and

harmless - unlike antimony, which can be dissolved in water and is potentially toxic. Furthermore, other

dangerous chemicals have been found to leach out of PET plastic bottles, including Napathalene (the

chemical found in mothballs), provoking anaphylactic-type reactions in some consumers and Bisphenol A.

The rapid growth of the global bottled water market may also have had negative environmental

impacts too. Many of the brands of bottled water currently available in the UK are transported hundreds of

miles around the country by road and some foreign brands are flown thousands of miles across the globe.

Welsh “Ty Nant” water is available in British Columbia, Canada – hardly a water-stressed part of the globe,

and “Evian” is an even more global phenomenon. Perhaps the most infamous of these however I s “Fiji

Water” which is imported from the middle of the South Pacific Ocean to North American and Western

European markets. Conversely, there are other bottled water brands which appear on the bottle to have

come from far away pristine corners of the earth, which are in fact from far less exotic sources. A notorious

example of such misleading marketing has been the case of ‘Everest’ water, sold in the US. The bottle’s

label pictures snow-capped peaks and the name would suggest that the water has come from the sparsely

populated region in Nepal wherein the mountain in question is located -- rather than the municipal water

supply of Corpus Christi, Texas, which is the actual source of the product!

Counting the Cost of Bottled Water

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 The figures regarding the comparative cost of bottled water show just how unacceptable it is for

public money to be spent on bottled water. At 0.22p a litre, tap water is 141 times cheaper than the

bestselling mineral water in Europe (Evian) which, even if you buy it in a supermarket, costs 31p a litre.

Some bottled water is more expensive than a good bottle of wine, whisky or even some champagne. Table 2

shows how the price of bottled water can vary from different outlets compared with the average cost of tap

water. Of course such costs can arguably be borne in the relatively rich Western industrialised group of

Table 2 The costs of tap water against bottled water

Average cost How many times more

Type of water per litre expensive than tap water?
Tap water 0.22p n/a
Supermarket own brand 8.5p 39
“Evian” water, average price 31p 141
“SEI” water at Selfridges £5.58 2,536
“Berg” at Claridges £30 13,636
(Source: Which? Advice 2009)

countries. But from the perspective of even middle-income countries, such as Mexico (ironically, one of the

world’s largest consumers of bottled water) such prices are disproportionately high, and it is worrying that the

proliferation of bottled water could induce municipal authorities in developing nations to de-emphasise public

drinking water provision. A related issue involves the rapid proliferation of “dual water pipe” systems,

especially in China and the East Asia. Based on the assumption that standard municipal hook-ups are unfit

for human consumption developers have been quick to “add value” (and profit) to their developments by

installing separate “pure water” supply lines, at great cost to the consumer. What’s more, the greater the

proliferation of such systems, the more municipal supply of drinking water (which depends on extensive

cross subsidies, from urban to rural, from rich to poor, etc.) is undermined.

Finally, bottled water companies are increasingly taking a page from the playbooks of their soda pop

parent organisations, entering into exclusionary franchising deals with large institutions (such as prisons and

universities) to secure monopoly access to “captive” populations. Bottled water companies have moved

aggressively to monopolise access to groundwater resources throughout North America and Europe.

Consumer Motivations & Perceptions

So what is persuading people to pay more per litre than they spend on petrol for water which can be

obtained easily and, according to the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM)

is on average 500 times cheaper from the tap? Companies in the bottled water market have used a wide

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range of methods involving the psychology of perception, motivation and buyer behaviour to lead consumers

to choosing their product in order to meet their ‘needs’. An American study into motivations behind drinking

tap water alternatives found that among consumers who drink filtered water, 58% said safety was their

primary reason for drinking filtered water, with 38% citing “taste” as their key criterion. The study found that

across the U.S.A. people who were concerned with the safety of their municipal tap water tended to drink

filtered water as an alternative to water direct from the tap, whereas people who did not like the taste of tap

water opted for bottled water, skipping the more economically logical option of filtration of tap water.

Yet in blind taste tests, fewer than 1 in 4 consumers can tell the difference between even “premium”

bottled water and the tap alternatives. A Birmingham, Alabama Water Works (BWW) testing exercise (using

a top brand water (Dasani), a distilled water brand (Crystal), and BWW tap water) found that only 23% chose

the bottled water as their favourite and the largest group were those who chose tap water as their favourite

(Vann, 2004). In another test carried out by Health Which? a panel of testers had no measurable preference

of bottled water over a sample of tap water. Similarly, in a study conducted in December 2008, the authors

found that taste-testers did not appreciably prefer our expensive bottled water sample (Ty Nant) over other

bottled waters (Evian and Highland Spring) or tap. Moreover, the authors found that consumer preferences

were further “confused” when the packaging of our tasting samples – indicating the packaging has a very

great deal to do with the “taste” of the water.

A Question of Social Justice

The Mar del Plata agreement of 1977 declared that there should be a universal right to sufficient clean

water to support the social, cultural and economic development of every citizen on the planet. Subsequent

international legal instruments have echoed and developed this call, though as yet it is unclear if there is an

enforceable right to water. If present trends continue then more than a generation’s worth of effort to widen

access to clean drinking water could be undermined as water authorities use the switch to bottled water to

shift investment away from public water infrastructure development. The burgeoning bottled water industry

represents a fundamental challenge to the ideal of clean water for all and needs to be resisted, through

scholarship, through communication, and through activism.

Bibliography
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Written by Mr Andrew Fox & Dr. Chad Staddon

Department of Geography & Environmental Management
University of the West of England, Bristol

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