The label on Aquafina water bottles will soon be changed to spell out that the drink comes from the same source as tap water, the brand's owner PepsiCo said Friday.
A group called Corporate Accountability International has been pressuring bottled water sellers to curb what it calls misleading marketing practices.
Aquafina is the single biggest bottled water brand, and its bottles are now labeled "P.W.S." The new labels will spell out "public water source."
See - there was nothing deceptive there. Doesn't everybody know that "P.W.S." stands for "public water source"?
Aquafina is a brand of purified bottled water products produced by PepsiCo, consisting of both unflavored and flavored water... It was first distributed in Wichita, Kansas in 1994, before becoming more widely sold across the United States, Spain, Canada, Lebanon, Turkey, the GCC countries, Iran, Egypt, Vietnam, Pakistan and India to compete with The Coca-Cola Company's Dasani and Dr. Pepper Snapple's Deja Blue. As of 2009, Aquafina represented 13.4 percent of domestic bottled water sales in the United States, making it the number 1 bottled water brand as measured by retail sales.
A young man who was doing some work for me asked me if I had some ice. I knew he drank bottled water, so I said yes to the ice, but that I had no bottled water. He asked me, "But what do you drink?" I told him I drank the same tap water that made the ice, and he was shocked. Advertising has sure done a great job on convincing people to buy bottled water, hasn't it? And that doesn't even toch the use of all the plastic to make all those bottles.
ReplyDeleteMy case for using it is a little rare so I know it applies to very few people. I've been aware for a long time that Aquafina is from public water sources (reading about a product rather than listening to marketing) but, it's not bottled straight from the tap. It's filtered rather well before being bottled and shipped. But, for me, it's never been about the "it's better than tap water" marketing B.S. In my limited case, it's very true. I live near an area with multiple military bases and a plant that makes rocket fuel. This has led to the seepage of a lot of perchlorates into the water supply. These normally do not cause people issues but, cause severe migraine headaches for me. The problem is that the local water sources make no attempt to remove these chemicals and no household filter removes these chemicals either, you have to install a reverse osmosis filter or get bottled water that has been filtered through the same process or a process that achieves the same goal. My local co-op has such a system as does the Pepsi-Co plant that makes Aquafina in my area. A rare but, useful case where the marketing has helped me; not intentionally, of course. They have the advantage of tasting better to me but, that's a preference, not a health issue.
ReplyDeleteWe recently spent a few weeks on vacation in the US and just couldn't find nice bottled water - it was all filtered/purified stuff like Aquafina and Dasani. In much of Europe the default bottled water is mineral water which tastes much better and is similar in price. In the US we usually ended up having to buy outrageously priced Fiji water flown thousands of miles across the oceans :(
ReplyDeleteWhen I had a coffee shop, I offered free filtered water. (The same stuff I used to make coffee. Beans are important but so is the water.) It was excellent. Certainly better than the stuff in Aquifina bottles.
ReplyDeleteOccasionally, I'd get customers unhappy that they couldn't buy a bottle of water. People can be nuts.
I buy bottled water to drink because tap water is what is used in public toilets and the smell produced in a public toilet is not just from urine, it is also from the chlorine in the water.
ReplyDeleteFor me whenever I sniff a glass of tap water it is as if I am about to drink from a public urinal.