BOTTLED WATER: In 2016, bottled water outsold soda for the
first time in US history. From one perspective, this is a great thing, people are choosing to
drink water instead of soda. But, from another perspective, it’s braindead that Americans are
spending so much money on bottled water. It’s one thing if you don’t have access to clean drinking
water but this only applies to 0.6% of Americans, most of whom live in rural areas. Despite this,
96% of Americans continue to buy bottled water resulting in the average American consuming 47
gallons of bottled water every year. And much of this consumption isn’t on hiking trips or
vacations. No, Americans literally buy cases of bottled water and drink it on a regular basis
instead of tap water. Families who do this spend on average wait for it $1,350 per year on bottled
water. If you ask them why, they’ll point to the taste or the filtration or the mineral content,
but there’s no evidence to back this up. In fact, a 2010 study found that the majority
of participants couldn’t even distinguish between bottled water and tap water. Also,
bottled water is not healthier than tap water. If anything bottled water is actually worse because
93% of bottled water tends to be contaminated by microplastics. And speaking of plastics,
86% of bottled water gets thrown away resulting in nearly 4 billion pounds of plastic trash and
2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide every single year. So, objectively speaking, bottled water
provides no health benefit for 99.4% of Americans and its expensive financially and environmentally.
But then, why do people still buy bottled water? Well, the answer is brilliant marketing. You see,
the soda industry isn’t crying over the fact that people are moving away from soda because
they were the ones who engineered this transition in the first place. Take a look at this lineup of
bottled water. At first glance, it looks like a good assortment of different bottled water. But
many of these brands are owned and/or distributed by none other than Coca Cola and Pepsi. Coca Cola
is involved with Dasani, Ciel, and Smartwater while Pepsi is involved with Aquafina, Schweppes,
Life WTR, SoBe, Sparkling Oh, and Evian. And if a bottled water brand isn’t owned by these two,
it’s probably owned by Nestle who owns 67 water brands around the world. So, here’s how these 3
behemoths brainwashed America into paying $16 billion for bottled water every single year.
A MIRACLE PRODUCT:
Taking a look back, bottled water is by no means a new invention. The first bottled water plant
can be traced back to 1622 to the United Kingdom. From the very beginning, the premise of bottled
water wasn’t exactly scientifically sound. I mean, the first bottling plant in the UK was
literally called “The Holy Well Bottling Plant”. As you may have guessed, the water promised to
offer medicinal value especially when it came to healing and rejuvenation. Despite its shaky
scientific roots, this idea quickly spread across Europe and we saw bottling plants popping up next
to every natural spring across the continent. This trend was simply accelerated by European
colonization and imperialism. As these super powers traveled to new areas, they were exposed
to nature that was completely untampered with, and this simply got them more obsessed with the
idea of getting their hands on the most natural water possible. But while this idea was quickly
spreading across Europe, it took quite some time for it to catch on in America. In fact, the first
commercially produced bottled water in America didn’t come about till 1767 or nearly a 150 years
after the UK. Americans also didn’t buy bottled water for some sort of miracle reason. Rather,
they were just trying to get access to the cleanest drinking water they could which was
actually a serious concern. Back in Europe, however, bottling plants were simply leaning
more and more into marketing aspect. In 1783 for example, a Swiss clockmaker named Johann
Jacob Schweppe would discover a way to carbonate water. Suddenly, bottling plants had another way
to market water. Not only was their water holy but now it was holy and sparkling. Surprisingly, this
also took quite some time to catch on in America. It wasn’t till 1809 or 26 years later that the
first patent for carbonated water was filed in America. It seems that Americans were surprisingly
grounded when it came to bottled water. Gimmicks like holy water and sparkling water didn’t really
push them to buy bottled water but disease did as was the case in the 1850s. Typhoid and cholera
outbreaks were becoming increasingly common which made bottled water highly appealing. And given
that the supply of bottled water was somewhat limited, pricing went through the rought. A single
pint of water cost as much as $1.75. Adjusting for inflation, we’re looking $63 for a pint of water.
This was the first time that bottled water started carrying a certain prestige in America. Only the
rich were able to spend $63 on bottled water so bottled water naturally started being associated
with a high social status. This was the case for quite some time as in the next 50 years but in
1905 the entire industry would be disrupted. This year, English doctors would convince authorities
to implement public chlorination plants. A few years later in 1908, New Jersey would
implement water chlorination and this marked the end of bottled water atleast for quite some time.
THE TAP TAKES HOLD: The impact of water chlorination
cannot be understated. Water chlorination is considered to be one of the 10 greatest public
health achievements of the 20th century, and looking at the numbers, it’s not surprising why.
Water chlorination destroyed diseases like Cholera and Typhoid well before vaccines were developed.
In 1900, there were 100 cases of Typhoid fever per 100,000 people. By 1920, this number dropped
to 33.8 cases per 100,000 people. And by 2006, this number dropped to just 0.1 cases per 100,000
people. And even amongst these cases, 75% of them occurred amongst international travelers.
Not only was chlorination extremely effective but it was also extraordinarily cheap. In fact,
you can treat a million gallons of water with just a single dollar. This made it easy for
municipalities across the US to implement water chlorination and within no time,
most Americans had access to clean drinking water from their taps. This quickly put an end to the
popularity of bottled water. The reality was that bottled water was simply too expensive for
the average American. And the only reason that it was so popular was because drinking tap water was
an actual health risk. But now that tap water was safe to drink, people were quick to forget about
bottled water. This isn’t to say that bottling plants quit trying to sell bottled water though.
From their perspective, the biggest obstacle was price. If they could just make bottled water cheap
enough, maybe they could convince people to buy once again. The biggest factor making bottled
water so expensive wasn’t actually the water itself, it was actually the bottling. Water was
traditionally bottled in glass, so no wonder it was expensive. This was only made worse by
the great depression as the average person had less money than ever. This was really the rock
bottom for the water bottle industry but things did slowly get better. In the 1940s, bottlers
would start experimenting with plastic bottles. These were indeed cheaper than glass bottles but
only marginally so. It wasn’t until the 1950s and the introduction of high density polyethylene that
bottlers were really able to bring down the price, but this didn’t help sales like the expected.
While bottled water was indeed affordable, it was still significantly more expensive than tap
water which made it kind of a stupid purchase especially when there was no objective benefit.
This is very much the case to this day. In fact, bottled water is one of the most highly marked
up items in the world. Producing bottled water only costs 5 cents on average. So,
if you’re paying a $1 for it, you’re looking at a 2000% markup. For perspective, even movie
theather popcorn is only marked up 1300%. This is because somewhere along the line, bottlers
finally realized that they simply couldn’t compete against tap water in terms of price. Tap water was
simply always gonna be cheaper. And if bottlers couldn’t convince customers based on price,
they had to convince them based on perceived quality and that’s exactly what they would do.
TIME TO BRAINWASH: The extraordinary resurgence of bottled water
can be traced back to a single marketing campaign from a company called Perrier. Perrier was already
doing quite well back in France. They were very much the exception when it came to bottled water
as they were not only doing well but they were exploding in popularity. In fact, between 1946
and 1952, Perrier was able to grow their sales 15X from 10 million bottles per year to 150 million
per year. What made their popularity even more perplexing was that they were seemingly doing
everything wrong. They had stuck to glass bottles and they were unapologetically expensive at over
$2 per bottle, but the truth was that this was their secret. Perrier marketed themselves as the
premium water meant for premium customers. And in the 1977, Perrier would bring this same marketing
strategy to America. They would spend $5 million advertising Perrier as Earth’s first soft drink.
They claimed that Perrier was more quenching, more refreshing, and most importantly more natural.
This tapped into our natural desire to live longer and healthier and find the oh so elusive fountain
of youth. Perrier would pair this marketing with brilliant positioning. They would place
their water in the most elite restaurants and hotels in New York and Los Angeles,
further solidifying the idea that the rich were living longer and better due to the water
they were drinking. This completely redefined how Americans perceived bottled water. They
started to believe that bottled water was indeed better than tap water but it wasn’t quite enough
to get the average joe to switch over. You see, Americans were quite busy and arguably addicted
to drinking something else: soda. But, over time, awareness about just how unhealthy soda really was
started to spread and people would start cutting back in the late 1990s. Pepsi and Coca Cola were
witnessing this stagnation first hand as they saw their empires slowly melt away. But, that didn’t
last for long as both of these guys would swiftly pivot to water. These guys already had decades of
experience advertising sugar water. All they had to do now was market the water without the sugar.
Perrier had already created a premium image around bottled water so all Pepsi and Coca Cola had to
do was double down. Pepsi would launch Aquafina and Coca Cola would launch Dasani and they would
both strategically price bottled water to be more expensive than soda. Why was water more
expensive than soda? Well, obviously because it was healthier. These two also had connections
with basically every retailer on the planet, so getting their miracle water into stores was no
problem at all. And once their product was on shelves and their commercials about youth and
nature were airing, all they had to do was wait. During the first 8 years of the 2000s,
bottled water would rocket in sales while soda stagnated. During the next 8 years,
bottled water continued to rocket while soda declined leading us to where we are today.
BOTTLED WATER DOMINATION:
In the end, the only reason that bottled water is so popular today is because of a brilliant
pivot from Pepsi and Coca Cola. They saw that their core market was declining due to health
concerns so they decided to create a new market centered on health. The reality though is that
bottled water has nothing to do with health. In fact, bottled water is less heavily regulated
than tap water. The FDA does not require bottlers to disclose water sources, treatment processes,
or even contaminant reports. Municipalities on the other hand are required to send you this
information on an annual basis, though of course no one looks at these but atleast its there. This
means that there’s usually a lot more variation regarding cleanliness when it comes to bottled
water. One study found that tap water is pretty consistent generally having between 0.2 to 2.7
bacterial colonies per milliliter. Bottled water on the other hand had anywhere between 0.01 to
4900 colonies per milliliter. In fact, 6 of the tested brands had 1500 to 4900 colonies
per mililiter. So, the idea that bottled water is healthier or cleaner is just a brilliantly
constructed facade and all the extra money you’re spending on bottled water is just going to pockets
of our favorite bottlers Coca Cola and Pepsi. And that’s how America got brainwashed into
drinking bottled water. Do you drink tap water or bottled water? Comment that down below.
Also, drop a like if you agree that bottled water is overhyped.
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