WATER WASTE OF MONEY!
One bottled water comes from melted glacier and costs £26. Another claims to cure cellulite. Britons now pay £2.5bn a year for a liquid you get free from a tap. Why DO we swallow the hype?
THE dress code of the clientele in Planet Organic, an upmarket deli in London’s Notting Hill, is gym chic. On a hot day in mid August, the men wore mid-thigh shorts, pectoral-enhancing vests and neon Nikes; the women were in black leggings and intricate ensembles of sports bras and cross-strapped Lycra.
They had all either just worked out, were about to work out, or wanted to look as if working out was a constant possibility.
They examined the shelves. Never mind the food. Life, in 2016, is liquid. Opposite a display of untouched pastries and assorted bread products (who, in Planet Organic, still eats bread?) were the waters.
There was Life, Volvic, Ugly, Sibberi (from birch or maple trees), Plenish, What A Melon watermelon water, Vita Coco, CocoPro, Coco Zumi, Chi 100% Pure Coconut Water and an alternative birch water promising to ‘eliminate cellulite’ (called Buddha Water).
Water is no longer simply water. It has become a commercial blank slate, a word to which any ingredient or fantastical, life-enhancing promise can be attached.
No matter that one such bottled water — Glaceau Smartwater, made by Coca-Cola — was declared ‘no better or worse for you than regular tap water’ by the British Dietetic Association.
In the past two decades, bottled water has become the fastest-growing drinks market in the world. Last year, in the UK alone, consumption of water drinks grew by 8.2 per cent, equating to a retail value of more than £2.5billion. Water sales are 100 times higher than in 1980.
For a substance that falls out of the sky and springs from the earth of its own accord, water has always had an extraordinary commercial lure. For centuries, wealthy Europeans travelled to spa towns to sample the water in a bid to cure specific ailments.
In 1740, the first commercial British bottled water was launched in Harrogate. According to its website, by 1914 Harrogate Spring was the largest exporter of bottled water in the country, ‘proudly keeping the troops hydrated from England to Bombay’.
In the early 20th century, however, a water revolution nearly killed the nascent business.
A typhoid epidemic in Lincoln in 1905 prompted public health crusader Alexander Cruikshank Houston to try out the first extended chlorination of a public water supply. It worked and, soon, chlorination of municipal water had spread around the world.
As a result, the bottled water industry almost collapsed. In the past, buying clean water had been a necessity for the rich (the poor simply endured bad drinking water and often died from the experience).
Now, it was freely available to all. Why would you continue to spend money on something that came, miraculously, out of a tap?
The answer arrived in 1977, in the form of what must be one of history’s greatest pieces of TV advertising narration. ‘Deep below the plains of southern France,’ rumbled Orson Welles, in a voice that sounded as if it were bubbling up from an unreachable subterranean cave, ‘in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, Nature herself adds life to the icy waters of a single spring: Perrier.’
As viewers watched the water descend into a glass and admired the glistening green bottle, marketing history was made. From 1975 to 1978, Perrier sales in the U.S. increased from 2.5million bottles to more than 75million.
Soon enough, rumours circulated of Madonna bathing in bottled water, and actor Jack Nicholson was photographed at the Oscars brandishing a bottle of Evian as if it were Cristal. Bottled water can be marked up like no other substance on Earth. The £1 a bottle of water often costs could pay for about 1,000 gallons of tap water.
Some waters — Evian, Perrier, Highland Spring and Harrogate Spring, for instance — come from natural sources, so at least you feel you’re paying for geography, for the fantasy of a shepherd sitting on a rock catching the icy flow in a glass jar specifically for your pleasure. But plenty of bottled waters are simply re-fashioned tap water.
In February 2004, Coca-Cola attempted to launch Dasani in the UK (‘Dasani’, by the way, means nothing). Five weeks later, the company took all 500,000 bottles off the shelves after headlines such as the Daily Star’s ‘Are They Taking Us For Plonkers?’
Coca-Cola had followed its successful strategy in the U.S. and purified tap water, added mineral salts, and was selling it for 95p a bottle. But the company hadn’t accounted for Britain’s long memory for sitcom storylines — in this case, the episode of Only Fools And Horses in which Del Boy and Rodney bottle tap water in their flat and sell it as Peckham Spring water. Then there was the issue of a batch of minerals contaminating Dasani with a possibly carcinogenic substance. In little more than a month, Dasani was dead.
Ten years later, Coca-Cola launched a new bottled water in the UK. In the intervening decade, the industry, after a brief dip following the 2008 financial crash, had entered its hyperactive new phase.
Coca-Cola’s new water is called Glaceau Smartwater. It comes from a spring in Morpeth, Northumberland, and is ‘vapour distilled’. In other words, it is evaporated and then condensed again, a process Coca-Cola calls being ‘inspired by the clouds’.
Ten years ago, this, too, might have got the Peckham Spring treatment. But these are different times. Glaceau Smartwater is now worth £21.9 million and, this year, Coca-Cola announced a £15 million investment to expand the factory where it is made. At present, it turns out 56,000 bottles an hour.
There now seems to be no limit on
We pay more per litre of bottled water (£1.49, Waitrose) than petrol (£1.10) or Coca-Cola (£1)
what a water can be, or what consumers are willing to buy: 2016 could, perhaps, be the year the market lost its mind.
It is no longer enough for water to simply be water: it must have special powers. Recent additions include blk. water (black water), FAT water (water containing ‘quality fat’) and deep ocean water harvested off the coast of Hawaii (which, allegedly, hydrates you twice as fast as ‘normal’ water).
New water samples arrive on the desk of Rahil Vora, managing director of the health food chain Revital, every week. ‘It’s a fashion thing,’ he said. ‘Water in a can was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.’ Water in a can? ‘Literally. I got sent a box of samples. And it was just water. In a can.’ Martin Riese, whose website describes him as ‘the world’s foremost expert on water’, is disdainful of Glaceau Smartwater: ‘Sorry, Smartwater, but you are not a premium product,’ he told me in his thick German accent. ‘You are a highly processed product and your water belongs in the trash can!’ For Riese, a purist, ‘bottled water has to come from nature’. Any processing is, he believes, ‘the biggest scam on planet Earth!’ Riese really, really loves water. ‘It started for me as a very small child,’ he told me. ‘I was four years old, on vacation, and I was blown away by the fact that the tap water in the city tasted differently.’ After school, he started working in restaurants in Germany, put together what was possibly the world’s first water menu in 2005 for a Berlin bistro, and wrote a book, Die Welt Des Wassers (The World Of Waters).
He moved to America in 2010 and became that country’s first water sommelier. In 2013, he launched the longest water menu in Los Angeles at Ray’s and Stark Bar, and cofounded his own brand of mineral water: Beverly Hills 90H20.
A case of 24 500ml bottles is $72 (around £60), while a bottle from the ‘Luxury Collection, Diamond Edition’ will cost you $100,000. It has a white gold cap set with more than 850 white and black diamonds and holds the profoundly questionable honour of being the world’s most expensive bottle of water. If you buy it, Riese will present the bottle to you in person at a private watertasting anywhere in the world.
At present, Riese sommeliers at Patina, a restaurant in the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. There, he guides diners through his water menu. First: ‘Do you prefer sparkling or flat?’ Then: ‘Do you prefer your bubbles more progressive, like very intense, or a little bit on the smaller side, like champagne bubbles?’ Finally: ‘Do you prefer something at the high mineral end, on the salty and bitter side, or smoother with a lower mineral composition, like maybe a little bit on the fruitier side?’ Basically, the taste of water varies according to the total dissolved solids (TDS) that it contains. These can be any substance, but the key elements are sodium, magnesium and calcium. Any filtered or chemically treated tap water will usually contain fewer solids than a bottled water that still carries the minerals from the water’s source, be it glacial, maple sap or natural spring. ‘Some people think I’m the biggest scam artist,’ Riese told me. But he believes he is simply applying the principle of wine to water — terroir. The taste of natural water, just like
All the Earth’s water has existed since the planet was formed. So we’re drinking the same water dinosaurs drank
wine, is affected by geography: the earth and rock it passes through.
Last year, the Merchant Hotel in Belfast launched its water menu — including one £26 bottle — to a global chorus of mockery. Gavin Carroll, the Merchant’s general manager, gave the whole episode its only possible name: Watergate.
When I visited this summer to sample the menu, he still seemed a little puzzled by the reaction. ‘We’re like: “Really? It’s just water”.’
For £26? ‘We’re a fivestar hotel. We have to offer our customers choice.’
The Merchant’s executive chef (and chief architect of the water menu), Patrick Leonard, brought out the notorious £26 bottle, called Iceberg. The water comes from the Canadian Arctic ice shelf in Newfoundland, frozen 10,000 years ago.
‘They’re not allowed to remove parts of icebergs,’ said Leonard, ‘so they have to wait until they separate. They detach naturally and then they’re netted, brought on a boat to land and allowed to melt.’
Leonard poured a portion of the ancient iceberg into a tumbler. The pressure mounted. I was painfully aware that the glass of water in
front of me was worth a tenner. I sipped, swallowed — and couldn’t taste anything at all. This was not a total failure of my unsophisticated palate. Melted iceberg essentially has no taste, having the lowest TDS (9mg) of any water on Earth.
We moved on to Whitehole Springs, a Somersetsourced, calcium-rich still water that passes through tufa rock; Vichy Catalan, a salty Spanish sparkler; and finally, De L’Aubier Sap Water, from Canada, a by-product of the maple syrup manufacturing process.
And, I’ll admit, tasting this quartet of waters taught its own lesson. Pay attention, as with anything, and you notice more, appreciate more. After the featureless purity of the melted iceberg, the Vichy Catalan was like snorting peppercorns.
Of course, there is something deranged about the idea of netting an iceberg and waiting for it to melt — applying heat would, apparently, ruin the taste. There is also something disturbing about paying nearly £30 for it.
AT SOME point, surely, we will reach ‘peak’ water. Perhaps it will be the moment consumers lose faith in the cellulite-eradicating powers of Buddha Water or wonder if it’s really worth paying over the odds for birch sap. The peak, however, is not in sight: for now, experts can only see growth steadily increasing in the bottled water market, at 5 to 6 per cent across the industry over the next five years.
If there is a final frontier of water, then perhaps it is the waters now being invented for children.
In August, Capri-Sun (owned by Coca-Cola) launched a range of juicy waters; last November, Volvic released its Star Wars collection, including bottles decorated with Chewbacca and Darth Vader; and in May this year, the first-ever sparkling water for kids was launched in the U.S., called Tickle Water.
According to the latter’s CEO, Heather McDowell, Tickle Water was her son’s idea. When he was two, he asked for a sip of her sparkling water, loved it ‘and the next day he was like: “Mommy, I want tickle water!”’ she told me, enthusiastically. Tickle Water comes in a transparent plastic can with an aluminium lid.
For McDowell, if making water look like Coke means kids drink more water and less Coke, this can only be a good thing (although Tickle Water does come in ‘natural cola’ flavour, too).
Somehow that feels like the final twist in water’s elaborate rebrand.
A version of this article first appeared in The Guardian.