Advertisement for Perrier (ca. 1970s). (Courtesy of The Advertising Archives)

14

The Only Proper Drink for Man

BRUCE NEVINS was a veteran advertising executive. After graduating from the Stanford Business School, he worked in advertising at Benton & Bowles in Manhattan before moving on to Levi Strauss to become merchandising manager for international operations, where he spearheaded the advertising campaign that propelled Levi’s jeans from $10 million operation to a $400 million operation in 1973. He left Levi Strauss and began consulting with small companies. In February 1976, while acting as a consultant for Pony Sporting Goods, a small Canadian firm, Nevins visited Paris to meet with one of the company’s investors, Gustave Leven. Leven also happened to be the chairman of Source Perrier, a French company that sold bottled water throughout the world.¹

Bottled Perrier water had been sold in the United States since the early twentieth century, but the Depression had pretty much killed the market for imported water. Even by the 1970s, few Americans were willing to pay high prices for imported sparkling water, especially when it tasted pretty much like club soda. Consumers also resisted paying for bottles of uncarbonated Poland Spring because it tasted about the same as tap water. There were many other bottled waters on the market and none sold very well in the United States, especially when compared to the wildly successful Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola soft drinks.

In the course of their conversation, Gustave Leven asked Bruce Nevins what he thought could be done to increase Perrier’s sales in the United States. At the time, Perrier was sold in some restaurants but few stores. Distributors were unwilling to tie up funds in a product that just did not sell. Therefore, a small advertising campaign would just not work because there were few places where consumers could buy Perrier. Nevins had a ready answer: Perrier needed to be repositioned as a health and fitness drink. A massive marketing and public relations campaign could simultaneously promote Perrier to the public and to distributors. Impressed with Nevins’s concept, Leven invited him to become president and part owner of Perrier’s U.S. distribution company.

In his new capacity with Perrier, Nevins launched an advertising campaign in the spring of 1977 with a hefty television budget. The legendary actor and director Orson Welles was hired to do the voice-overs for the television commercials, in which he announced in his inimitable baritone: “There is a place in the south of France where there is a spring, and its name is Perrier.”² The Perrier logo was splashed on the sides of distributors’ trucks and café umbrellas. Customers were served chilled Perrier water in stores. Perrier sponsored fitness programs and running events in many cities, such as the New York Marathon; the company gave a substantial sum to the organizers of the marathon and supplied 7,500 bottles of Perrier for the runners, along with shorts and shirts bearing the Perrier logo.³ This was just the beginning of a promotional effort that soon changed the entire bottled water industry and created a new product category. Within a decade, Americans everywhere—at work, play, home, or on the road—could be seen clutching their ever-present plastic bottles of brand-name water.

Background

Colonial Americans were not keen on drinking water, and for good reason: there was a constant fear about the quality and purity of water. This was particularly true in the southern colonies. Because the principles of sanitation were only dimly understood, colonists polluted their rivers; moreover, the colonists’ wells were too shallow and too close to their outhouses. Water supplies, particularly in cities, often were contaminated with various disease-causing organisms, and epidemics of typhoid and other waterborne diseases were fairly common occurrences. Constantin-François de Volney, a Frenchman who lived in the United States for three years beginning in 1795, wrote with disgust of Philadelphia’s water, which received “filtrations from the cemeteries and privies” and, if kept for a few days, “acquired a cadaverous stench.”⁴

There were solutions—effective and otherwise—for the problem of bad water. It could be boiled, for instance, or filtered. Catching and storing rainwater or getting water from a spring were other possibilities. Some people also believed that adding alcohol to water would purify it. That said, even water acknowledged as pure was considered second best to alcoholic beverages because water had no nutritional value. There was also a class stigma associated with drinking water—after all, even the poorest Americans had access to it.

As the temperance movement gained adherents during the early nineteenth century, water came to the fore as the answer to the evils of alcohol. William Alcott, an early-nineteenth-century physician, believed that water was “the only proper drink for man.” In his writings, he bolstered this view with quotes from European medical authorities, one of whom proclaimed that “water drinkers are in general long livers, are less subject to decay of the faculties, have better teeth, more regular appetites, and less acrid evacuations, than those who indulge in a more stimulating diluent for their common drink.” Alcott opposed the consumption of any alcohol, coffee, or tea.⁵ Health reformer Sylvester Graham strongly concurred: “Pure water is, as a general rule, the most salutary liquid that can be used.”⁶

Alcott’s and Graham’s successors became interested in hydropathy, an idea imported from Germany around 1840. Hydropathists believed in the “water cure,” a therapeutic system for improving health that emphasized frequent bathing in and consumption of mineral waters. One hydropath, a doctor named Joel Shew, began publishing the Water Cure Journal in 1845.⁷ Another leading hydropath, James Caleb Jackson, had been a farmer and then a newspaperman; throughout his early life, he had been plagued with ill health. In 1847, Jackson visited a spa and took the water cure. To his amazement, the water cure helped relieve his ailments. That same year, Jackson opened a hydropathic institute in Cortland County, New York; when it burned down eleven years later, he reopened the institute in Dansville, New York. Like Graham and Alcott, Jackson also banned the use of alcoholic beverages and such stimulants as tea and coffee.⁸ His spa, like others that focused on hydropathy, was always all about the water.

Spas and Bottled Water

In Europe, spas had been frequented by the infirm (and the wealthy) since the sixteenth century. Cities like Bath, in England, and Baden Baden, in Germany, grew up around the reputation of their healing waters. It was believed that European spa water—which bubbled up in springs or was drawn from wells, steaming hot or icy cold, crystal clear or cloudy with minerals—had curative power and even, in some cases, spiritual powers.

In the nineteenth century, European health spas became increasingly popular with the general public, especially in France. One of the most famous healing springs is at Lourdes, in the Pyrenees; since the mid-nineteenth century, the sick and lame have drunk and bathed in the spring water at Lourdes, hoping for a miraculous cure. By the end of the nineteenth century, an estimated 300,000 French men and women visited spas annually. But the spas fell out of fashion in the early twentieth century, and their owners bottled water as a supplement to their income. In France alone, there were more than 1,100 registered springs. By the end of the century, a single small spa at Val-les-Bains exported several million bottles of Vals water annually.⁹ Among the venerable European spa waters still bottled today are Apollinaris, Evian, Perrier, San Pellegrino, Vichy, and Vittel.

Although there are millions of natural springs in the United States, successful spas and bottling operations were established at only a few. Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, had attracted the well-to-do well since well before the American Revolution, and it remained popular throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1820, Dr. Darius Griswold began bottling water at Saratoga’s Congress Springs. He stuck with the business for just a few years before leasing the bottling rights to the springs to Dr. John Clarke and Thomas Lynch in 1823. Clarke and Lynch promoted Saratoga Mineral Water, the first commercially successful bottled water in the United States. Their water was first distributed to New York City and then shipped to other eastern cities. By 1830, Dr. Clarke was shipping 1,200 bottles of water a day. By 1856, the company was distributing more than 11 million bottles annually throughout the United States and to foreign countries.¹⁰

As the nineteenth century progressed, more Americans ventured into the bottled water business. One of the most successful entrepreneurs was Hiram Ricker of Poland Spring, Maine. His father founded a spa there in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until 1845 that Hiram began bottling water in three-gallon clay jugs, which he sold for 15 cents each. Ricker’s Poland Spring water was sold in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. When submitted to judges at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Poland Spring water was awarded a Medal of Excellence for its “purity” and “natural medicinal properties.” The company was so delighted with the award that it purchased the Maine State Building from the exposition and moved it to Poland Spring. In 1903, Poland Spring water won another award at the St. Louis World’s Fair; this buoyed sales so much that by 1907 the company built a new bottling facility that incorporated all the latest technology.¹¹

The secret to Poland Spring’s success was its advertising, which claimed that it could cure “dyspepsia, liver and kidney complaint” and that it “purifies the blood.” Virtually all spring water bottlers claimed similar health benefits for their products. Baldwin Cayuga Mineral Water, from upstate New York, was touted as a cure for “Bright’s disease, diabetes, kidney afflictions, liver complaints, dyspepsia, all affections of the bladder, all forms of rheumatism, all skin diseases” and was a “wonderful tonic for general debility.” The bottlers of Middletown Healing Spring Water, in Middletown Springs, Vermont, claimed that their product was “nature’s remedy. Drink it. It will cure your ills. Cures kidney diseases, scrofula, salt rheum, erysipelas, dyspepsia, general debility, chronic consumption, catarrh, bronchitis, constipation, tumors, piles and cancerous affections.” Drinking Chippewa Natural Spring Water, from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, was supposed to be “beneficial and remedial in cases of Typhoid Fever, Kidney Diseases, Rheumatism, Gout, Constipation, Indigestion, Headache, etc.”¹²

With the passage of the Food and Drug Act by the U.S. Congress in 1906, transporting products with such extravagant medical claims across state lines became illegal. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took legal action against many companies for making such claims, including a number of bottled water companies. Partly as a result of such increased scrutiny, many spas and spring water bottlers shut down over the years. Several thrived, however, and their brand names, at least, have survived: Deer Park, founded in 1873 in western Maryland; Shasta Water, founded in 1889 at Shasta Springs, California; Arrowhead, founded in 1892 near San Bernardino, California; Sparkletts, founded in Los Angeles in 1925; Ozarka, founded in Texas in 1905; and Calistoga Mineral Water, founded in Napa, California, in 1924. These and other small regional companies mainly distributed five-gallon bottles of water, which were used for office and home water coolers. As bottling technology became more efficient, smaller bottles of water for table use became available and affordable for most Americans.¹³

In the early twentieth century, Americans also began taking an interest in bottled water from other countries. One early favorite was Perrier, which came from springs at Les Bouillens, a spa in the town of Vergèze in southern France. Les Bouillens was a fashionable nineteenth-century resort for both the French and English upper classes. For those unable to visit, the owners had been bottling and selling its carbonated water since 1863. In 1898, an entrepreneur and physician named Louis-Eugène Perrier, along with some financial backers, bought the spa. For five years, Perrier tried to sell the bottled water for health purposes, since it reputedly cured all sorts of illnesses. The business did not do as well as he had hoped, however, so he sold it to a British visitor named John Harmsworth, the younger brother of the founder of the London Daily Mail. Harmsworth, no doubt thinking that “Frenchness” would enhance its appeal to British consumers, renamed the water after Perrier. He designed a chubby twelve-ounce bottle of green glass and coined the slogan “The Champagne of Bottled Waters.” In 1904, Harmsworth launched a massive advertising campaign in England, promoting Perrier as a good mixer for whiskey (for teetotalers, the ads pointed out, it was just as good with a slice of lemon). The ad campaign included huge front-page advertisements in the Daily Mail.¹⁴ Medical professionals endorsed Perrier, calling it “the most perfect table water” that was “absolutely perfect in organic purity, while its very light mineralization makes it safe for table use.”¹⁵ Promotion and testimonials paid off, and sales of bottled Perrier skyrocketed.

Harmsworth distributed and promoted Perrier throughout the British Empire; sales outside England surged in such diverse places as India, Uganda, and Jamaica.¹⁶ His next target was the United States. Even before Perrier was imported into the United States, the American medical profession had been alerted to its purported healing qualities.¹⁷ In 1907, Harmsworth established an American subsidiary, Great Waters of France, to distribute Perrier, and it began a massive marketing campaign in the United States. Perrier water was identified as a “luxury from France” and as “the chosen table water of Europe.” To distinguish Perrier from other sparkling waters, advertisements stressed that Perrier’s carbonation contained “only natural gas,” while other sparkling waters were charged “with artificial carbonic acid gas,” which was condemned in Europe. Perrier was promoted as a health beverage, and advertisements carried endorsements from various sports figures. Jay Gould, who had recently won an international tennis match, was quoted as saying, “When taking violent exercise, I always drink Perrier, and I always find it most beneficial.” And, he added, “Ladies greatly appreciate [it].” Advertisements advised readers to “drink Perrier with your meals at your home, restaurant or club.”¹⁸ Perrier advertisements that appeared in 1909 proclaimed that France possessed “the finest table water in the world” and warned Americans of “imitations in similar shaped bottles.”¹⁹

By 1914, Harmsworth was selling 2 million bottles of Perrier annually. Although World War I disrupted sales, after the war ended in November 1918 sales rebounded. When Prohibition took effect in 1920, Perrier’s sales in America skyrocketed. Presumably, it was in demand as an alternative to alcoholic beverages or for use as a mixer with bootleg hooch.²⁰ Another downturn came when Prohibition was repealed during the depths of the Depression; few Americans could afford water imported from France, especially when bottled soft drinks sold for a nickel at the time.²¹

At the time of Harmsworth’s death in 1933, production of Perrier water was at 19 million bottles per year.²² A group of British shareholders took over the company, which thrived until World War II broke out in 1939. The German occupation of France disrupted the production of Perrier, and this time the war’s end did not bring a resurgence of sales. Imports into the United States were limited, and the price of Perrier remained high because bottling the water at the spring and then shipping the heavy, bulky glass bottles was expensive.

In 1947 the British investors sold the Perrier company to Gustave Leven, an energetic businessman. Leven rebuilt the company through mergers and acquisitions of other spring water companies. He modernized the company’s bottling plants and streamlined operations. He also engaged in massive promotional campaigns using endorsements from sports stars. By the early 1960s, Perrier was the largest advertiser in France. The effort paid off, and Perrier soon caught up with its two major competitors, Evian and Vittel.

Having reestablished his European operations, Leven was ready to tackle sales in the United States; the company’s American subsidiary launched a major advertising campaign in 1963. Sales soon reached 500,000 bottles, but this was disappointing when compared with pre–World War II sales figures.²³ It seemed that Americans were just not ready to buy imported water, especially since most tap water in the United States was basically free, more or less palatable, and safe—or so most Americans believed.

Water Controversies

As American cities rapidly expanded in the nineteenth century, problems with municipal water supplies were almost inevitable. In 1832, more than 3,500 people in New York City died of cholera, a waterborne disease. Beginning in the late 1830s, city planners improved their water delivery systems and made other changes to guarantee an adequate and safe water supply. Water contamination, however, continued to be a problem in many cities. In 1900, about 200 of every 100,000 deaths in America were caused by waterborne diseases. By the beginning of the twentieth century, microbiologists had identified the waterborne bacteria—such as Salmonella typhi, Shigella, and Vibrio cholerae—that caused diseases. They also found that these bacteria could easily be killed by exposure to chlorine. In 1909, the city of Philadelphia added small amounts of compressed liquefied chlorine gas to its public water supply in order to eliminate bacteria, and many other municipal water systems followed suit. Safe tap water, of course, contributed to a decline in the consumption of bottled water.²⁴

Chlorination was so effective in combating waterborne disease that scientists explored other ways of using drinking water to improve public health. During the 1930s, scientists working at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) found widely divergent rates of dental cavities in different communities in the United States. They hypothesized that higher levels of natural fluoride in the water were helping protect teeth against decay. To test their theory, NIH scientists fluoridated the water in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for five years (1945–1950). The experiment demonstrated a significant reduction of cavities among those living in Grand Rapids. As a result of this experiment, water fluoridation became an official policy of the U.S. Public Health Service, and, within a decade, fluoridation was widely used throughout the United States. Wherever fluoridation has been instituted, the incidence of tooth decay has dropped dramatically. Fluoridation was not without its critics, however. Citing various reasons, some dental and medical professionals, health-food advocates, religious groups, environmentalists, and libertarian groups opposed—and continue to oppose—fluoridation.

Simultaneously with the concern about fluoridated water came an increased interest in the environment. For decades, industrial waste and untreated sewage had been dumped into the nation’s rivers and lakes—the water sources for many municipalities. The publication of the book Silent Spring by American biologist Rachel Carson in 1962 opened the eyes of many Americans to the dangers of pesticides and their impact on the environment. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a large and vocal environmental movement emerged, leading to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act two years later. Although this legislation would greatly improve the quality of municipal water systems and other laws would outlaw dumping sewage and industrial contaminants into the nation’s water system, many Americans remained concerned about drinking water that came out of a tap.

Promoting Bottled Water

Bottled water companies perceived an opportunity as the environmental controversies swirled around tap water. In 1971, Schweppes introduced its “pure drinking water” in hopes of cashing in on tap water concerns. Poland Spring promoted its bottled water with the slogan “City water … is enough to drive you to drink.” Such ads did not endear the bottled water companies to city water planners, who protested that American tap water was perfectly safe.²⁵ Meanwhile, bottled water companies and manufacturers of home water filters continued to attack tap water, generating serious doubt about its quality in the minds of many Americans.²⁶ Bottled water sales continued to increase, and, in addition to the delivery of water-cooler-size quantities, bottled water subsequently was sold in more manageable one-gallon and smaller sizes at grocery stores and supermarkets.

The promotional campaign that Bruce Nevins conceived for Perrier in 1977 meshed perfectly with the rise of anti-tap-water sentiment. To distinguish Perrier from cheaper brands of seltzer and soda water, it was described as “naturally carbonated” by unique processes that took place deep underground within the Perrier spring. Nevins targeted the campaign at college students and young professionals who, he thought, would be susceptible to the dual message that Perrier was not just healthful (free of impurities, sodium, and caffeine) but also a chic drink without calories.²⁷

Another message in Nevins’s promotional campaign was that Perrier took “time to make” (by Mother Nature, of course) and was therefore in limited supply.²⁸ Retailers that ordered ten cases received only one, intensifying the demand for Perrier while enhancing its mystique. For many baby boomers, the cost of bottled water meant nothing, but drinking water imported from France had definite cachet. Before the ad campaign was launched, Perrier sales generated $500,000 annually; three years later, sales exceeded $5 million.²⁹

Once the success of the Perrier model became apparent, other bottled water companies instituted aggressive advertising campaigns to increase their name recognition and sales. Evian, another French bottled water, was introduced in the United States in 1978. Despite such emerging competition, Perrier continued to dominate the industry until 1990.

Bottled Water Crises

The bottled water industry made a significant shift in 1989 when the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottle was first used for Nestlé’s bottled water.³⁰ The PET half-liter bottle was lightweight and recyclable. PET bottles had been used for soft drinks since 1977; after its introduction in the bottled water industry, it quickly became the industry standard for bottled water as well. However, PET bottles became a target for environmentalists, who pointed out that making and recycling plastic bottles consumes a disproportionate amount of energy. The recycling potential of the bottles was not a selling point for environmentalists because most PET bottles—an estimated 75 percent of the single-serve size—ended up in landfills (and in 2006 Americans bought and tossed out an estimated 50 billion bottles).³¹ The proliferation of such bottles as waste is thus another environmental issue. The bottled water industry has been attacked by many environmental and other groups, such as the National Resource Defense Council, Corporate Accountability International, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Despite issues raised by environmentalists, bottled water sales continued to increase and Perrier dominated the bottled water industry; by 1990, it produced 1.2 billion bottles annually, controlling almost 45 percent of the entire global bottled water market. In the United States, Perrier accounted for 80 percent of the imported water sold, but this was all to change in a matter of months.

Researchers at the Mecklenberg County Environmental Protection Department in Charlotte, North Carolina, were investigating industrial pollution; one of their assays required an absolutely pure solvent. For this solvent they selected Perrier water, long touted as the product of a pristine natural spring. When test results in January 1991 showed the presence of minute quantities of benzene, a known industrial pollutant and carcinogen, the investigators identified the source of the chemical as the Perrier spring water. The quantities found did not justify a recall, but investigators issued a health advisory warning consumers not to drink Perrier until more tests had been conducted.³²

On February 9, 1990, Perrier management announced that the benzene contamination had been caused by a cleaning fluid mistakenly used on a machine that bottled water only for the North American market. Perrier’s American subsidiary recalled all 72 million bottles in the United States. Then, three days later, other scientists reported finding benzene in samples of Perrier water sold in their countries as well. Gustave Leven, the company’s seventy-five-year-old chairman, immediately issued a worldwide recall.

Three months after the benzene crisis, Perrier relaunched its product, but now both the water and its reputation were held up to further scrutiny. An investigation by the New York State attorney general’s office subsequently found that

Perrier has not bubbled up to the ground surface to be collected and bottled without processing since at least 1956, but rather is pumped from the ground through a pipe, the natural gas is removed, and then recombined with the natural and processed gas. A significant portion of Perrier came from recent rainwater and was not of “ancient” origin. In addition, Perrier sometimes contained more than 5 milligrams of sodium per eight-ounce serving.

Perrier settled out of court without admitting guilt.³³ Thanks to another highly effective promotional campaign, sales of Perrier did eventually rebound, but it never again dominated the American bottled water industry the way it had before the benzene crisis.³⁴

Despite these problems, the bottled water industry in America continued to grow exponentially. When Perrier fell from grace, other brands readily took up the slack. Evian, for instance, began a major marketing campaign in 1992, quickly becoming America’s most purchased imported bottled water. Despite ongoing concerns about the purity and authenticity of bottled water, such concerns were just a minor blip on the road to stardom: sales of bottled water jumped from $115 million in 1990 to $4 billion just seven years later.³⁵

As the bottled water industry expanded, a number of labeling problems have also emerged. Many consumers, understandably, believe that the water actually comes from a spring at the location named on the label. In many cases, however, production has expanded far beyond the capacity of the original springs. Today, for instance, Poland Spring water comes from an estimated 400 wells in Maine, and many other “spring waters” named for specific places have simply become brand names; the water is no longer sourced at a single location.

Expansion and Consolidation

Perrier began acquiring other water companies, starting with Calistoga Mineral Water in Napa, California, in 1980, followed by Arrowhead Spring Water in 1987. In 1992, Perrier was itself acquired by Nestlé, a Swiss corporation that is the world’s largest food conglomerate. Nestlé had first entered the bottled water industry in 1969 by acquiring the French company that bottled Vittel water. A decade later, Nestlé began gobbling up American water bottlers: Poland Spring in 1980, Ozarka and Zephyrhills in 1987, and Deer Park in 1993. By 2006, Nestlé’s bottled water brands controlled 32 percent of the U.S. market. Its largest brand is Poland Spring, which generated $600 million in sales annually by the early twenty-first century.³⁶

A number of other corporations became involved in the bottled water industry. For example, the European food company Danone, best known in the United States for Dannon yogurt, acquired Evian in 1970. It was Danone that established a significant place for Evian in the U.S. market when the American bottled water industry took off in the 1970s.

As the bottled water industry revved up, various soft drink bottlers, notably PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company, also became interested in the field. With their existing facilities, these companies already had what they needed to bottle water easily, as well as experience in producing, distributing, promoting and selling bottled beverages. Both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola introduced bottled water products in the 1990s.” PepsiCo introduced Aquafina in 1994, and Coca-Cola followed suit in 1999 with Dasani. Unlike spring waters, both Dasani and Aquafina are purified products that originate as city water, with the minerals, salts, bacteria, and pollutants filtered out. Dasani is simply filtered water, while PepsiCo adds minerals and other components to its Aquafina. Aquafina quickly became the largest-selling bottled water brand in the United States, followed by Dasani.

Bottled water was sold just about everywhere in the United States—at grocery stores, supermarkets, and bodegas; from street vendors; at sporting events; and from vending machines in schools, offices, gyms, and public buildings. In many restaurants, waiters were instructed to encourage customers to order bottled water, eventually generating an estimated $200 to $450 million annually in bottled water orders at American restaurants.³⁷

Enhanced Water

Not content with selling simply spring or mineral water, bottlers eventually introduced enhancements to their products. Perrier, for instance, added lemon and lime flavors to its line of bottled water products back in the 1960s.³⁸ Inevitably, as the bottled water market grew, more and more unusual products appeared. There was glacial water from Iceland, artesian well water from Fiji, and spring water from a dormant French volcano. Bottled waters are also flavored with a wide variety of substances, such as cucumbers, fruit essences, and even black truffles—substances that supposedly add vitamins and minerals and improve the taste of the water. As one bottler admitted, “You might think that pure H₂O would taste the best.” Jim Shepherd, Dasani’s group director of research and development, said that pure water “tastes flat. All wrong. Water is not supposed to be that pure.” Waters made in America add magnesium sulfate, potassium chloride, and sodium chloride, which give the water a “crispness” that Americans love. Europeans, however, want the chalky flavor and smooth feel given by calcium carbonate, noted Shepard.³⁹

Enhancing or fortifying water to make it more “healthful” is now a huge industry worldwide. You can buy bottled water pepped up with caffeine, ginseng, vitamins, and “superoxygen,” to name a few additives. Other companies jumped on the enriched-water wagon. One was Fuze Beverage, which was formed in 2000 in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The company makes energy drinks and vitamin-enriched beverages. It was purchased for $250 million by the Coca-Cola Company in 2007.

Yet another company producing enriched water was Energy Brands, headquartered in Whitestone, New York, which operates under the name of Glaçeau. Founded in 1996, the company was acquired by the Coca-Cola Company in 2007 for $4.1 billion. Its calorie-free Smartwater was enhanced with electrolytes and marketed as a sports drink. Energy Brands also produces Fruitwater, a fructose-sweetened version of Smartwater that comes in raspberry, peach, grape, and lime flavors. Another of the company’s products is Vitaminwater, which contains minute amounts of added vitamins but has sugar as its main ingredient (33 grams per 20-ounce bottle). The ad campaign for Vitaminwater said that it would keep the consumer “healthy as a horse” and bring about a “healthy state of physical and mental well-being.” Advertisements also claimed that Vitaminwater “may reduce the risk of age-related eye disease.”⁴⁰ The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) filed a class action lawsuit against Coca-Cola, claiming that Vitaminwater’s marketing claims were likely to mislead consumers. CSPI’s lead litigator described Vitaminwater as “no more than non-carbonated soda, providing unnecessary added sugar and contributing to weight gain, obesity, diabetes, and other diseases.” In July 2010, a federal judge ruled against the Coca-Cola Company, stating that its advertising violated FDA regulations. Vitaminwater, as well as the similar PepsiCo product SoBe Lifewater, and many others—artificially colored and flavored, heavily sweetened, and “enhanced” with additives—have brought bottled water a long, long way from its origins as the purest, most natural beverage for humankind.

Bottled Water Today

Today, millions of Americans pay anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water than for tap water,⁴¹ partly because they believe that bottled water is purer and safer than tap water. But the fact is that an estimated 90 percent of tap water in the United States meets or exceeds federal health and safety standards, while some bottled waters have been shown to be contaminated.⁴²

Some people choose bottled water for its taste—or so they think. Whether bottled waters really taste different has been questioned. In the 1970s, during a radio interview with Perrier executive Bruce Nevins, Michael Jackson of KABC in Los Angeles presented Nevins with six unmarked samples of club soda and one of Perrier and asked him to pick out the Perrier. Nevins got it right—on the fifth try. In the years since then, many more formal blind taste tests have proved that most Americans are unable to distinguish carbonated bottled water from club soda or mineral water from tap water.⁴³

Largely because of the economic downturn that began in late 2007, bottled water consumption in the United States dropped off in 2008 and 2009 for the first time in three decades. Even so, Americans still consume about 27.6 gallons of bottled water per person—more than any other beverage category except soft drinks. By 2010, bottled water accounted for an estimated 29 percent of total beverage consumption in the United States⁴⁴ and total annual revenues equaled almost $11 billion. As with many American products, the main reason for the success of bottled water was, and continues to be, promotion through advertising and marketing.⁴⁵

Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It (2008), summed up Americans’ interest in bottled water:

Over the last fifty years, bottled water went from a specialty item—for snobs and aesthetes—to a commodity widely available to anyone with a little cash and a desire to set him or herself apart from the tap-drinking masses. Molded by hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements, many of which traded on the sex appeal of supermodels, athletes, and Hollywood celebrities, we started to think that bottled water was healthier and tastier than tap, and that it would somehow make us more attractive to the opposite sex.⁴⁶

Postscript

Nevins left Perrier in October 1980 and has worked with a number of smaller companies since then, including the Adams Natural Beverage Company, which produced carbonated Napa Natural with 67 percent fruit juice and no preservatives. When the product was rolled out in March 1984, it had to be recalled as the high sugar content of the juice encouraged fermentation and the cans bulged and some exploded. It was reformulated—this time with 30 percent fruit juice—and rolled out again the following year with O. J. Simpson was selected as the company’s spokesperson. The venture might have succeeded; however, at the same time PepsiCo came out with Slice—a 10 percent fruit juice—and its sales swamped those of Natural Napa, which promptly disappeared.⁴⁷ None of Nevins’s other efforts have been as successful as his promotional campaign with Perrier.