Highland Spring now Britain's favourite bottled water
... overtaking Evian as
the nation's favourite, and becoming the first British brand to top UK
sellers.
The water company Highland Spring sold 200m litres last year, up 9% on 2011, and pushed Evian into second place, followed by Buxton, Volvic and Nestle Pure Life, market researchers Zenith discovered.
A thirsty nation knocked back 2.14bn litres of bottled water in 2012, up 3.3%, with nearly nine out of 10 choosing still water and the rest sparkling.
It caps a remarkable rise for Highland Spring, based in Blackford, Perthshire, and owned by the Al-Tajir family, originally from Dubai. Maher Mahdi Al Tajir is now ranked as Scotland's richest man with an estimated £1.5bn.
Employing 400 workers at five bottling plants in Scotland and Wales, the company said revenues were £86.4m in 2012, up from £86.4m a year earlier. (huh?)
Les Montgomery, chief executive of the company, said: "European brands have long dominated the UK bottled water category, having played a pivotal role in its development in the 1970s, but I believe we are seeing a sustained wave of support for British brands."
Bottled water sales in the UK hit £1.5bn last year, with those aged 25 to 34 the biggest consumers. A recent report by Mintel said sales were likely to hit £2bn by 2016.
16 comments:
Why on Earth would I want to buy water?
I have taps which gush gallons of the stuff any time I feel thirsty.
Unless, of course, I were to espouse the metro-sexual, ultra-green "I want purity, no matter how much energy it takes" ideology.
It's all bollocks. Get yourselves a Brita filter and run tap water through it, decant it into any old Evian or whatever plastic bottles, sorted.
But I agree, it is a terrible shame that the bottled water companies are being so ruthlessly undercut by the evil alcohol purveyors.
It's often overlooked that bottled water essentially competes with other commercial soft drinks, not with tap water.
Mark, but if you want fizzy water, you need a sodastream and they are surprisingly expensive.
bottled water costs more than alcohol in the same way that a car costs more than a house, if you compare a BMW 5 series with houses in former Welsh mining areas.
Don't see Peckham Springs water on the list.
What gets me with bottled water, which the family can't leave alone, is carrying it from the car: the weight of it.There must be lorries, weighed down to the axles, churning up the roads.Of course, in a science fiction world many aeons into the future, they would have a system of pipes instead.But,like LVT, not in our lifetime!
But exactly the same weight arguments apply to beer and Coke.
A reminder - for Selsey.Steve and DBC Reed in particular - of a news story from March 2004
"First, Coca-Cola's new brand of "pure" bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its "highly sophisticated purification process", based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.
Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that.
The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.
So now the full scale of Coke's PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it "pure" and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for "taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide - which is not a problem - into bromate - which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre)."
The weight comparison with beer and Coke is a bit off. Neither is available at low cost on tap (if only, in the case of beer).
It was, I believe, one of the myths about Sybaris that they had wine on tap: a myth that excavations showed to be true.
"B, but I don't want fizzy water."
But I do, and what's more, the fizz is free: Tesco's cheapest still water (which must be bottled tap water) costs 8.5p/litre for both the fizzy and the still version, but I agree, buying bottled still water is madness.
B: "Tesco's cheapest still water (which must be bottled tap water) costs 8.5p/litre for both the fizzy and the still version"
Jesus! So Tesco are knocking out beer and cider for less than 8.5p/litre? No wonder there's a binge drinking epidemic.
I dealt with this issue in my magazine column here.
C, are you suggesting that the pol's are lying? Perish the thought! What else might they have lied about?
All it would take is for journalists, each time someone from Alcohol Concern or from government tries to make this claim to ask them what the cheapest beer is in Tesco, and the cheapest water in Tesco, and then ask them to explain how beer is cheaper than water. Some of that, and they'd soon realise they would have to drop it.
It's why all this blogging stuff is growing. Bloggers are doing a better job of exposing lies and distortions than most journalists.
TS "All it would take is for journalists ..."
True, but it rests on the presumption that the journalist is at least sufficiently motivated enough to even wonder whether the claim holds up, rather than just accepting it at face value. I'd dearly like to report that I could recall even one instance of a MSM journo having shown that motivation, rather than just repeat the claim unchecked.
"if you compare a BMW 5 series with houses in former Welsh mining areas."
That reminds me of an ad for the Citroen 2CV years ago: "Faster than a Porsche". In very small writing at the bottom it was pointed out that a 2CV at its maximum speed of 65mph could easily pass a Porsche doing 40.
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