Boxed Water weaning Americans from the bottle
Company hopes environmental concerns help growth
HOLLAND, Mich. – Way before recycling and sustainability were common concerns, a Michigan company offered an alternative to plastic water bottles.
Though founded in 2009, it wasn't until recently that the company, Boxed Water, grew. Its products can now be found on Alaska Airlines flights and in Four Seasons hotels, among other places.
Even the co-founder of the Hollandbased company is surprised at the trajectory the 15-year-old company, which makes a square-shaped cardboard carton filled with water, has taken.
“We're a startup company in sustainability, and no one's talking about sustainability,” Daryn Kuipers, CEO and co-founder of Boxed Water, said in an interview in September as he recalled a conversation he had with the company's board in 2016. “People don't want us. How are we going to grow this thing?”
Bottled water surpassed carbonated soft drinks in 2016 to become the largest beverage category by volume in the U.S., according to research and consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp.
Bottled water has been around for centuries. It grew dramatically in popularity in the late 1970s, when Perrier launched its bottled water brand in the U.S. with a massive advertising campaign, according to an excerpt of the book “Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice” published in Fast Company. Perrier's success led other big beverage companies to want to get a piece of the growing bottled water market, said author
Daniel Jaffee, and in 1992, it was acquired by Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage corporation. Shortly after, Groupe Danone, a French conglomerate, brought its Evian and Volvic waters to North America.
During the 1990s, this market underwent another upheaval with the entry of giant soda makers Coca-Cola with its Dasani brand and PepsiCo with Aquafina, Jaffee said.
A few other cultural shifts were occurring as Boxed Water was trying to grow: Americans were becoming more aware of the importance of drinking water.
There was a spotlight on the safety of drinking water because of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, when excessive levels of lead were found in the city's drinking water.
A USA TODAY investigation identified nearly 2,000 additional water systems in all 50 states where testing had shown excessive levels of lead contamination.
While Boxed Water was growing, reaching 80 employees at its peak and opening a second filling location in Utah in 2016, the company's board made clear it had to pivot because the company was spending more money than expected, said Kuipers, who wasn't as involved day to day while working at the Windquest Group, the family office for the DeVos family and the first investor in Boxed Water.
Kuipers was asked to come back and run the company in 2018 and change Boxed Water's strategy, which also meant a big reduction in staff, he said.
Boxed Water declined to disclose revenue but shared that it has increased in the last few years, jumping 22% last year compared with revenue in 2022. In 2022, revenue rose 64% compared with 2021.
The catch, though, is in the name of the product: “Boxed Water Is Better,” the labels say, not best. Boxed Water is trying to get every consumer who would buy a plastic bottle to purchase its product instead.
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Plastic water bottle consumption hasn't slowed since the company's founding – despite a growing awareness that plastic can take hundreds of years to break down in landfills, emits greenhouse gases and contributes to climate change. Even as the popularity of reusable water bottles increases, like the craze surrounding Stanley tumblers, consumers are still buying singleuse plastic water bottles in record numbers.
However, since Kuipers' conversation with the board nearly a decade ago, a broad swath of consumer-facing companies have looked for ways to increase their commitment to sustainability, and recycling accessibility and rates have risen.
Boxed Water has positioned itself as a way to enable these companies to tell their sustainability stories. It's a strategy that's working.
To stand out, Boxed Water needed to teach people about why their containers were worth the extra money. Plastic water bottles are cheaper and technically can be recycled, Kuipers said, so many consumers didn't see a problem with purchasing them.
Just 9% of plastic collected through municipal solid waste was recycled in the U.S. in 2018, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That 2018 number is the most recent statistic available from the EPA.