facts

One of the most profitable schemes ever devised to deprive the gullible of their money must be the sale of bottled water. In the western world, tap water is about as safe as it can be and it is relatively cheap. Yet many people are prepared to pay up to 1,500 times as much when the same stuff comes in a bottle. In this paper we will consider this phenomenon.

The bottled water boom was indeed an unlikely phenomenon. Perhaps the strangest thing about it was that this bland commodity made its impact in Britain at the height of a recession and with raging inflation. There was a general lack of money in people's pockets, yet bottled water became an overnight success. Strange too is the fact that present water companies boast of the purity of their product, when the various impurities that mineral waters contain used to be the whole point of buying the stuff anyway.

Natural water is never purer than when it falls on the hills as rain. Once it hits the ground, however, all that changes. Seeping into the soil, it moves underground through passages and caverns carved over the millennia, eating away at the rock and dissolving metals, salts and minerals along the way. As it goes, its character changes, depending on the type of rock through which it passes. Eventually, it arrives in underground lakes or aquifers - the sources of most bottled mineral waters.

But an advertising campaign by the French company, Perrier, in 1974 was to bring about a dramatic change. The Financial Times, in an article on the Mineral and Spring waters market, called the campaign a waste of time because bottled waters, it said, would be drunk only by cranks and foreigners. How wrong they were. Bottled water has become an extraordinary success story. Sales of bottled water totalled 3 million litres in 1976. In just one decade that figure rose to 128 million litres and by 1991 some 300 million bottles of mineral water were drunk in Britain alone. Wenche Marshall-Foster, Chairman and Chief Executive of Perrier UK, predicts that the market will rise to one billion litres a year by the turn of the century. A survey of 250 people from London and the Midlands, published in 1992, found that a quarter of them never drank water directly from the tap.

Perrier has been joined by many other companies eager to cash in on the trend. There are now 113 producers of bottled water in Britain, from large, hi-tech bottling factories to small, unsophisticated ones in garden sheds. All are attempting to cash in on the £1 million-a-day UK market. But the market is still dominated by the big names and supermarkets' own brands. Perrier owns Buxton Water, Contrex, Volvic, Vichy Saint-Yorre and others. Scotland's Highland Spring, which is owned by a consortium registered in Liechtenstein bottles for Tesco, Sainsbury's and the Co-op.