Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [13]
America had hundreds of regional bottled-water companies in the nineteenth and even twentieth century. But the bottlers focused, for the most part, on home and office delivery: they supplied offices with water for coolers. Single-serve water bottles, known in the biz as “packaged water,” hadn’t entered the public consciousness. All that changed with Perrier.
By 1988, the French company was selling three hundred million bottles a year; it controlled 80 percent of the imported water market and by 1989 had U.S. revenues of $110 million. Perrier’s lighthearted TV ads, which had a lot of fun with bubbles, were ubiquitous. They gave American consumers the idea that a touch of luxury was not beyond their means. During this period, Perrier was the best-known mineral water in the world.
And then disaster struck: in 1990, a random check of Perrier bottles in North Carolina turned up traces of benzene. (A known carcinogen, benzene comes from both nature and industry. Ingesting it at high levels can cause stomachaches, sleepiness, convulsions, and death; the health effects from low levels are unknown. The EPA allows five parts per billion of benzene in drinking water; Perrier had between eleven and eighteen.) The company announced a worldwide bottle recall, and sales, predictably, plummeted. But crisis for one was opportunity for others. The bottled-water juggernaut was in motion, Nestlé bought the wounded (but affordable) Perrier, and sales of non-Perrier water took off like, well, carbonated liquid squirting from a tiny hole.
It’s important to note that hardly anyone was drinking bottled water because he or she was thirsty and distrusted what came out of the tap or fretted about the calories in other beverages. That would come later. Modern consumers first sipped Perrier, or Evian or Vittel, because it signified. Water, in this case, was a social—not just a physical—resource. Ordering imported water was classy; it improved the tone of a dinner party. Once that idea took hold in America, there was no going back.
Between 1990 and 1997, U.S. sales of bottled water shot from $115 million to $4 billion, boosted by public health messages against obesity, by multimillion-dollar ad campaigns that emphasized the perceived health benefits of bottled water, and by an unglamorous technological advancement: the invention of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic. PET was cheaper, lighter, stronger, brighter, and clearer than the original polyvinyl chloride bottles; it was durable and, theoretically, recyclable. The introduction of the half-liter PET bottle in 1989 “revolutionized our industry,” Kim Jeffery, president of Nestlé Waters North America, said. For the first time, people had an alternative to portable sodas. After Madonna adopted Evian as her house drink (and love object: she fellated a bottle in her film Truth or Dare), and photographers snapped pictures of models toting bottled water—they said it clarified their skin and suppressed their appetite—a liter of Evian became a bona fide fashion accessory.
And so it went, into the next decade. Drinking bottled water, like practicing yoga and eating organic food, was a station on the way to enlightenment. Advertisers used words (pure, natural) and imagery (waterfalls, mountains) to imply that bottled water tasted better and was healthier than tap. Some brands went even further. In 2006, ads for Fiji Water stated, “The Label Says Fiji Because It’s Not Bottled in Cleveland.” Annoyed, Cleveland officials tested the import and found 6.3 micrograms of arsenic per liter. City tap had none. (The EPA’s maximum allowed level is 10 micrograms per liter.) Rohan Oza, a senior vice president of marketing at Glacéau, which makes distilled waters (in which water is boiled and then the condensed vapor is collected), told a business publication that Americans “are looking for products that make them feel better, physically, mentally, and emotionally.”
I have to laugh when I read that because Glacéau makes me feel worse. I’m not drinking the stuff: it is the