The practice of bottling and selling drinking water has a long history in America. The first phase occurred in the first half of the 19th century, as it became popular among fashionable Americans to "take the waters"—both bathing in and drinking mineral waters at resorts like Saratoga Springs in New York and White Sulphur Springs in what is now West Virginia.
By the s, as the practice of dip-molding made glass bottles cheaper and more reliable, entrepreneurs began bottling those popular waters and selling them in drug stores, groceries, and even saloons. The big appeal of these early bottled waters lay in their supposed health benefits. The Ricker family, who operated the Poland Spring resort in Maine and started selling its waters in the late s, originally touted them as a kidney remedy.
In the s, E. Stephenson, proprietor of St. Catharines Mineral Water, promised that his product, drawn from an artesian well in Ontario, would cure everything from "dyspepsia, liver and kidney complaints" to "sea sickness, fever and ague.
As bottling and distribution grew cheaper, more Americans turned to bottled water as an alternative to the questionable output from early urban water systems. The late 19th century saw the creation of a flurry of spring water companies; some of the brands, like Arrowhead and Ozarka, are still on the market today. But by the early 20th century, the chlorination of municipal water supplies made safe drinking water widely available, and the sale of bottled water declined into a specialty trade.
In the s, just million gallons of bottled water were being sold in the United States—about a gallon and a half per person per year. Much of that came in the big five-gallon jugs used in office water coolers; the rest made up a niche market of mineral waters bottled from natural springs. But then one of the niche players decided to get serious. Perrier, a French brand of sparkling natural spring water that was founded in the mids, had been languishing for decades, its distinctive green bottles selling in a few high-end restaurants and almost nowhere else.
In , the firm hired Bruce Nevins, a year-old ex—Special Forces officer and former Levi Strauss executive, to relaunch the brand to the American market with a blitz of television ads voiced by Orson Welles.
By highlighting its French pedigree and premium price, Perrier played off baby boomers' growing desire for status as the generation shed its tie-dyed T-shirts and started entering the corporate world.
Health concerns played an important role, too: Amid a wave of media coverage of studies linking saccharin—the artificial sweetener used in many diet sodas—with cancer, Nevins positioned "pure Perrier" as a healthful alternative to soft drinks. His timing couldn't have been better. Jogging was in; the Martini was out. Farrah Fawcett even used it to rinse her hair, the article declared. Perrier's American sales rocketed from 3 million bottles in to some million just four years later.
That opened the door for competing sparkling-water brands to flood the market. Bottled water's cachet only continued to grow alongside Americans' increasing commitment to exercise and healthful diets.
Health clubs and upscale stores in New York and Los Angeles introduced water bars, displaying bottles from around Europe and from even more distant locales like Fiji, charging, as Corby Kummer put it in a New York Times piece, "laughable prices for something that can be gotten out of a faucet. The International Bottled Water Association's voluntary code of standards dictates that advertisements "should not exploit consumer fears about the safety of public drinking water supplies.
Health officials pushed back, pointing to Perrier's benzene contamination incident as evidence that the bottled-water industry was hardly immune to contamination issues, and publicly fretting that dental hygiene might suffer as more people shifted to drinking non-fluoridated bottled water. By , municipal officials in cities like Houston and Kansas City were announcing plans to get into the bottled-water business themselves, with proposals to bottle and sell the output of their municipal water supplies.
Dan Jones, the deputy director of the Houston public works department, told the New York Times , "Municipal water professionals have always laughed at people paying ridiculous amounts of money for water that they know is not better than the water they get out of their tap.
We just note that for whatever reason, people seem to like to get their water out of bottles these days. In the end, though, it wasn't American cities that cashed in but the giant soft drink companies, who, after years of dragging their feet, finally decided to get into the game.
A tectonic shift was under way in the beverage industry, and it involved much more than water. Americans were looking for alternatives to carbonated soft drinks, and water was just one of many options—including bottled teas and lemonades, like Snapple and AriZona Iced Tea; sports drinks, like Gatorade and Powerade; and even coffee-based drinks—that surged in the market as the 21st century neared.
Pepsi was the first to embrace the new order. Pepsi began test-marketing Aquafina, its brand of filtered bottled water, in late , and a few years later rolled it out nationwide with a huge marketing campaign. Coke resisted following at first, preferring to promote consumption of its soft drinks over an alternative that might cannibalize sales. In February , The Coca-Cola Company gave in to the inevitable and introduced its first bottled-water brand.
The name was Dasani, which, as a Coke spokesperson explained, had no specific meaning but was intended to convey "a clean, fresh taste. As Coca-Cola and Pepsi moved into the market, the reactions from industry watchers were decidedly mixed. The s witnessed vigorous debates—sometimes lighthearted, sometimes in earnest—over whether bottled water was of any real value to consumers, or little more than a slick swindle. Beverage companies routinely used terms like ''mountain fresh'' and images of glaciers and snowcapped peaks to promote water that had never come within a hundred miles of a mountain, much less the Arctic.
Ozarka, an old brand that had surged back on the market in the post-Perrier years, was no longer bottled in the Ozarks but rather came from springs in east Texas. In the wake of the Aquafina and Dasani launches, a flurry of news stories emphasized the fact that, far from tapping mineral-rich mountain springs, the soda giants were merely pumping and filtering water from local municipal sources.
Many commentators found such details highly amusing, and portrayed the bottled-water business as something akin to selling ice to Eskimos—gulling consumers into paying a dollar or more for something they could essentially get for free.
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Evian had targeted sales for infants the baby bottle segment since the s, and its advertising emphasized its purity, although during the s, as the brand moved to large retail surfaces, it tended to emphasize the idea of everyday use. The growth of the market, however, had encouraged the opening or reopening of many springs, and some of these producers tended to sell on price with no advertising support, at the bottom end of the price spectrum.
The consolidation pattern seen in France did not occur worldwide, or even throughout Western Europe. Then, as now, bottled water-consuming countries all differ in customer preferences, distribution channels and the competitive dynamics that shape market structure. These countries exhibited differences in customer preferences, distribution channels and competitive dynamics that shaped their market structures.
A major change in the industry came with the introduction of purified waters by PepsiCo Aquafina in and Coca-Cola Dasani in In contrast to spring water companies, which typically extracted water from underground aquifers and springs, these companies used municipal tap water filtered through reverse osmosis systems that removed impurities from the water. This move allowed Coke and Pepsi bottlers to use their existing purification equipment used in the production of soft drinks and existing distribution channels.
Because water did not have to be transported from a single original source, this development allowed the development of strong national or even global brands that were produced locally.
Aquafina and Dasani were launched with strong advertising campaigns and mid-tier pricing, and quickly gained market share. These global statistics masked huge differences in penetration around the world. Bottled water consumption per capita also varied heavily: about 92 liters in Western Europe, 60 liters in the US. Within Western Europe, consumption differed markedly, from liters in Italy, liters in France, liters in Spain, liters in Germany, but only 23 liters in the U.
However, markets with greater per capita consumption also experienced lower growth. Annual volume growth from to in Western Europe was about 5.
Within Western Europe, growth rates differed, from 2. The main selling attribute of bottled water was its purity. Many brands emphasized the purity of their springs, which originated typically from underground aquifers in remote locations far from pollution sources. Bottled water gained in popularity as a light, rehydrating alternative to calorie-rich soft drinks or caffeinated drinks that could dehydrate the body.
By , the global bottled water industry was at an inflection point. During this period nearly impossible to tell apart by taste, and for which a free substitute existed tap water , it was not clear whether these global players would be able to create an attractive industry structure that would deliver sustained profits.
The U.
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