Marcus Leroux and Elizabeth Judge, The Times, April 23, 2009 - For some it was pure, bottled sophistication; for others, money for old rope, the epitome of the disposable, consumer society that took hold in the 1980s. Either way, mineral water was yesterday confirmed as a casualty of the credit crunch when Nestlé said that sales of the bottled drink were plunging.
Nestlé, whose brands include Perrier and S. Pellegrino, the “champagne of waters”, is the world's biggest food company and the largest bottled water producer. Sales of its water declined by 4.1 per cent in the first three months of this year, Western Europe being particularly badly hit. There was a fall of 9 per cent in the British market last year.
In 1980, only 30 million litres of bottled water were sold in Britain, less than half a pint per person. That grew to 1.3 billion litres in 2007 — but now, as well as cost-conscious consumers trading down to tap water, mineral water has suffered an environmental bashing.
David de Rothschild, a scion of the banking dynasty, is building a raft made of plastic bottles to travel from San Francisco to Sydney, taking in a visit to the East Garbage Patch — an area of the Pacific said to be strewn with plastic bottles. He hopes to illustrate the environmental impact of bottled water consumption, claiming that the industry is synonymous with a “throwaway society”.
Paolo Sangiorgi, head of Nestlé Waters UK, said: “The bottled water business, especially in Western Europe, is facing a challenge.”
Falling water sales, along with the appreciation of the Swiss franc, helped to push Nestlé's group sales to SwF 25.2 (£15 million), 2.1 per cent below the same quarter last year.
The company says that it has responded to environmental criticism by reducing the amount of plastic in its bottles by 33 per cent in ten years. It has also reduced its worldwide water usage in manufacturing processes by 6 per cent per tonne of production.
The company has also co-founded the National Hydration Council (NHC), an industry umbrella group. The council recently launched a campaign entitled “You ought to drink more water”, reminding consumers that on average people need to drink 1.2 litres of water a day to rehydrate.Jeremy Clarke, director of the NHC, said that two dismal summers had hit sales: “The other major factor is economic. This is our first recession as a mature industry. In the early 1990s, the market was nowhere near as developed and the phenomenal growth we have seen in the last decade has been when times are good.”
Giles Coren, restaurant critic of The Times, is a vituperative critic of bottled mineral water and has referred to it as “preposterous vanity” — but he has noticed a shift in restaurant culture. “People used to feel like a cheapskate asking for tap water in restaurants, especially if they weren't drinking,” he said. “I think that's changing — people do ask and more and more restaurants automatically bring it.
“That alone has a huge impact, because it's a completely unncessary product and it will fall away without the hard marketing behind it.”