Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [11]
All well and good, as stories go. But fashions changed, city water systems improved with the widespread use of chlorine, bottled water began to seem old-fashioned, the inn at Poland Spring burned, and Nestlé acquired the somewhat moribund company in 1992. Within a few years the springwater, now in plastic bottles, was edging its way into supermarkets far from the woods of Maine. (Meanwhile, the rebuilt inn has become what Arthur Frommer calls “America’s cheapest resort.”) Mascha likes the taste of Poland Spring but doesn’t care for its plastic bottle, or for Nestlé’s hard-nosed lobbying of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—which regulates bottled water as a food product—to allow water drawn from a borehole to be labeled spring. It isn’t honest, Mascha thinks, and it devalues water that actually is collected from springs.
According to the FDA, springwater must come from an underground formation from which water flows naturally to the surface of the earth. It may be collected through a borehole, instead of the actual spring, under certain conditions: the bottler must prove a hydraulic connection between the spring and the borehole; the water must have the same physical properties as the water from the spring; and the spring must continue to flow. The anti-borehole crowd believes these distinctions are too vague, and that boreholes—by pulling from too wide a zone with powerful pumps—can potentially suck in poorly filtered water and contaminants.
Then there’s the anti–Poland Spring crowd, which claims some of the company’s wells have no connection to a spring at all. (One Nestlé borehole in Florida is nearly five thousand feet from the actual spring—a necessity because of the region’s unique geology, says Tom Brennan.) The company argues that collecting water from a borehole is more sanitary than collecting it from a spring because the water never comes in contact with the earth’s surface.
Roused to take legal action, several small springwater bottling companies in 2003 initiated a class-action suit to get Nestlé to either abandon its boreholes or to change its Poland Spring labels, which didn’t list spring sources. In 2004, Nestlé settled, agreeing to pay nearly eleven million dollars in discounts and giveaways to bottled-water consumers and to make various charitable contributions. The suit didn’t settle whether Nestlé’s water is spring or not: it settled only that the plaintiffs’ attorneys would quit challenging the labeling. Other plaintiffs, with their own springwater to sell, continue to press on with similar lawsuits. All this legal wrangling could be avoided, says Bill Miller, president of the National Spring Water Association, which represents small bottlers, if the FDA would only simplify its rule: “Springwater comes from a spring, and well water comes from a well.”
There is another irony to the Poland Spring story. It was Perrier—Poland Spring’s stepmother or cousin, depending on how you look at the corporate hierarchy—that had cracked open the U.S. market for bottled water and set it down the path to sales of more than ten billion dollars a year.
Remember that spring where Hannibal and his elephants rested? A French physician named Louis-Eugène Perrier, who specialized in mineral-water treatments, bought it from a local businessman in 1898. Setting aside his medical practice, Perrier focused his energies on developing a glass bottle with a hermetically sealed metal cap, something that would stand up to the bubbly pressure inside. While Perrier was seeking financial backing, a wealthy Brit named St. John Harmsworth crashed his car near Nîmes and ended up in the hospital. There, he tasted the sparkling water from Vergèze and, when he recovered, hunted down Perrier, who offered him a tour of the springs. Harmsworth was, according to an annoyingly sunny company history, “instantly smitten.” Perrier