You can order a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Zen Restaurant, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Singapore.
But you won’t get one.
Executive chef Martin Öfner said the restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, only serves water from Swedish company Nordaq.
The restaurant’s dishes and drinks are also made with water, he said, from soups to juices in non-alcoholic beverages.
Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants serving Nordaq water, said company CEO Johanna Mattsson CNBC Travel. She said the water, which is also used by more than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, is purified and bottled on site using local tap water.
The company’s goal is to reduce single-use water bottles in the hospitality industry—whether they’re the cheap plastic bottles commonly found in hotel rooms or the glass bottles of European mineral water served in high-end restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles between its point of origin and its final point of consumption.
“There’s no point in transporting water over water,” Mattson said. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq’s bottles have no plastic labels, so they can be easily washed and reused, and they have a wide mouth so they can be washed in a regular dishwasher, she said.
Once refilled, the bottles are also securely capped and date-stamped, Mattson said.
The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Singapore has been using Nordaq’s tap water system since 2023. The hotel’s guest rooms, restaurants, spa and gym are equipped with bottled water.
Hotel manager Cindy Kong gave CNBC Travel a tour of its bottling facilities to see how bottles are cleaned, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the facility can produce 500 bottles of pure water per hour.
“Typically we process 1,000 to 2,000 (bottles) a day,” she said.
Nordaq is one of many companies in the high-quality sustainable water business. According to the company’s website, Castalie water is available in more than 700 restaurants in France, while Purezza water is available in more than 5,000 venues in 13 countries, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.
Indian hotel company ITC Hotels has created its own “zero mile” water brand SunyaAqua to reduce the use of single-use plastic bottles in its 140 hotels. “Every guilt-free sip is bottled in-house and does not need to be transported,” New Delhi-based ITC Maurya posted on Facebook in July.
Hospitality companies are a core market for Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates both within hotels (an upcoming facility at Rosewood Abu Dhabi) and through centralized facilities.
Mike Hecker, founder and CEO of Be WTR, said that in the latter, the water may flow a little farther than Mile Zero at the ITC Hotel, but not by much.
“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling plant because as we all know, the carbon footprint … is heavily affected by transport,” he told CNBC. “We’re targeting the point of consumption as much as possible.”
The company’s main operations are in the United Arab Emirates, but the water is sold to 12 countries, including recent expansion into Canada and China, Hecker said. The company closed a $44 million Series C round in October.
Be WTR can be seen everywhere, from Le Bristol Paris, which opened in 1925, to The Standard Singapore, which will open 100 years later in December 2024 (here).
Source: Singapore Standard
Be WTR has signed a global agreement with Accor, becoming the preferred partner of the French hotel company’s luxury hotel brands.
“We are the first company to have a global water agreement for (Accor) five-star brands such as Raffles, Pullman and Sofitel,” he said.
Reduce waste and increase profits
Companies that provide no- or low-transport filtered water to the tourism and food industries say they save millions of plastic bottles each year. But they have another selling point – they can also generate profits for their customers.
Be WTR’s Hecker said its first bottling plant at The Westin Mina Seyahi in Dubai “saves more than 1 million imported bottles per year. Both in terms of… carbon footprint and generating positive profits for our customers. All quite an achievement.
CNBC Travel Editor Monica Pitrelli tastes Nordaq water with CEO Johanna Mattsson. Statistics on Nordaq’s website show that the company has saved the use of approximately 5.7 billion plastic bottles, based on data extracted from the company’s bottling facilities.
Source: Zap PR
Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR would cost, but said its price was “competitive” with glass mineral waters imported from Europe.
Nordaq’s Mattsson said each bottle of water costs between 11 cents and 21 cents to produce. But water sells for much more. Providore Singapore sells free-flow Nordaq distilled and sparkling water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge four times that price for a single bottle.
Purezza estimates that each bottle of water costs about 30 cents to produce, about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water, according to one company sales brochure. But according to the brochure, both can be sold for the same price.
