Coke could have gone the same route, licensing a new brand to its bottlers. But the Coca-Cola Company had always sold syrup, and there was no syrup that you could use to create water. Ivester stewed for the better part of 1998 before he hit upon the solution. Coke scientists would formulate a proprietary mix of minerals that it would ship to bottlers to put in their purified tap water. This was its new secret formula, which it could market as every bit as unique as Coke’s own. After much focus-grouping, Coke created the perfect pan-national combination of syllables for its new beverage. Intended to signal relaxation and refreshment, the name Dasani could just as well be that of an Italian winemaker or an African tribe.
Dasani actually wasn’t Coke’s first entry into bottled water; it had bought Belmont Springs in the 1980s and Mendota Springs in the 1990s, both times suffering lackluster sales. But that was when water was a mere side venture to the runaway growth in sugary soda. Now water itself was the growth market. Coke put the full weight of its advertising power behind a new $20 million campaign intended to both sell the product and grow the market itself.
Coke targeted women, who consumer surveys showed were more focused on healthy living (and not coincidentally, more concerned with their kids’ drinking so much soda). In the same way that “The Pause That Refreshes” had addressed the anxieties of workers suffering from grueling production schedules, Coke played on the stresses of women struggling to balance the demands of the workplace and their responsibilities to home and family with new slogans such as “Life Simplified” and “Replenish the Source Within.” In 2002, Coke teamed up with Glamour magazine to give away an all-expenses-paid weekend in New York to the woman who wrote the best one hundred words about “Women at Their Best.” Applicants were “encouraged to list the ways in which they pamper themselves, thereby replenishing their own spirit everyday” (no doubt scoring extra points if they replenished themselves with Dasani).
The marketing worked—by 2003, bottled water was the one bright spot in a disastrous year for Coke. Bottled water sales were up to $8.5 billion overall—and Dasani had passed Perrier, Evian, and San Pellegrino to become the second-best-selling brand behind Pepsi’s Aquafina. And Coke had yet to go international with Dasani—the arena where it always out-fought Pepsi. As the company planned to launch Dasani across the Atlantic, it seemed there might actually be life after soda pop after all.
For its big overseas splash, Coke followed the same playbook it had for its soft drinks a century earlier, tackling the English-speaking world first. The launch for the United Kingdom was planned for March 2004, with drives the following month into Belgium and then France, the ultimate prize. The average French person drank more than twice what an American drank in bottled water, some 145 liters a year. Cracking that market would be a sweet victory for the company. Just a couple of decades after France had introduced bottled water to the United States, America would be returning the favor under the banner of the quintessential American brand. For the UK, Coke spared no expense, pouring £7 million ($13 million) into advertising, trumpeting the slogan “The more you live, the more you need Dasani.” For weeks, billboards around London declared, “Prepare to get wet,” and just before the launch, high-divers plummeted ninety feet with flaming capes into tanks of water to draw attention to the brand.
No amount of theatrics, however, could prepare Coke for what happened next. Just weeks after the launch, a British newspaper broke the story that Coke’s “pure” water was actually bottled in the southeast London suburb of Sidcup, which got its water from the River Thames. It was the equivalent of discovering that bottled water served in New York came from the Hudson. Immediately, Coke came under fire from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the British version of the FDA, for the improper use of the word “pure.”
Of course, Dasani wasn’t exactly tap water. While Coke might not let prying eyes into one of its water rooms, it touts a multistep scouring to turn pedestrian water into the final product. First, there is “ultrafiltration” to remove particles, followed by a carbon filter to remove odors, and a zap of ultraviolent light to kill bacteria. Most important, it passes through a reverse-osmosis filter—a technique, Coke told the skeptical British public, “perfected by NASA to purify fluids on spacecraft” to remove 90 percent of anything still remaining. Only then does Coke add back in its mineral mix, as the company has oxymoronically explained, to “enhance the pure taste.” Finally, the water is given a dose of ozone to get rid of hard-to-kill parasites such as giardia and cryptosporidium. The result, Coke claimed, was “as pure as water gets.”
Despite such assurances, the launch was a disaster. Soon, Dasani was being handed out for free in train stations and supermarkets in a desperate attempt to win customers. But the death blow was what happened next: Two weeks after the Sidcup jokes started, consumers stopped laughing when Coke tersely announced it was voluntarily recalling half a million bottles of Dasani. The water, it explained, had been contaminated with levels of the carcinogen bromate at 22 parts per billion, twice the amount allowed by the FSA (or FDA).
In the ultimate irony, then, Coke’s water was not only no more pure than London tap, but also more dangerous to drink. Quickly, Thames Water declared its water safe. Soon it became apparent the contamination hadn’t come from the pipes, but rather from a by-product of ozonation, one of the very methods Coke boasted of to “purify” its water. In a statement, Coke all but blamed the British government, saying that it was legally required to add calcium chloride into the water in the UK. The high level of bromide in calcium chloride, it continued, led to the formation of bromate when exposed to ozone.
That explanation might have held more water if the tendency to create bromate through ozonation wasn’t already well known in the industry. Just two years before, the FDA had warned manufacturers to use care in ozonation and test finished products for the presence of the chemical. An industry trade publication at the time went so far as to provide a formula for how much bromate can be formed given the amount of bromide in the source water. As a result of the warnings, Nestlé stopped using ozonation for Perrier in June 2001, even as Coke and Pepsi continued the process.
Whether through carelessness or arrogance, Coke had turned a public relations hiccup into a disaster, as Britons now vocalized their anger at the American company. “Should I Really Despise Coca-Cola?” read a typical headline, and there were plays on Coke’s own branding, such as “Things Get Worse with Coke” and “Dasani: It’s a Real Disaster.” In the face of such criticism, Coke declared an end to its European conquest, swallowing a cost of more than $45 million and giving up dreams of converting the French.
For the Europeans, it was the perfect opportunity to stick it in America’s eye during a time when the continent was chafing under George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and anti-American sentiment was at an all-time high. Any Coke exec tempted to write off the fiasco as the cranky proclivities of another continent, however, was due for a rude awakening back on American shores.
It’s a blustery spring day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where sets of four blue Dixie cups are arranged on a folding table in the middle of a city square. Three of the cups contain bottled water from the country’s most popular brands—Dasani, Aquafina, and Nestlé’s Poland Spring. The fourth cup is full of tap water from a café up the street. One by one, passersby stop by to sample them and guess which is which. If you think it’d be easy to tell the difference between the bottled water and the tap, you’d be wrong. The success rate of folks is only slightly better than random. Typical is Joe Marsden, a Cambridge resident, who stares in sullen disbelief at the table after identifying tap water as Dasani. “I thought I would have at least gotten Dasani or Aquafina right because I drink them the most,” he says. “I couldn’t tell the difference at all.”
Dubbed the “Tap Water Challenge,” the update of the Pepsi Challenge is run nationally by young activists belonging to the group Corporate Accountability International (CAI), which has made bottled water the latest
front in what it sees as the excesses of corporate power. Like anti-soda lawyer Dick Daynard, CAI cut its teeth in the fight against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, when it waged a boycott against Kraft, parent company of Philip Morris. However, the group dates back to two decades before, when it was originally founded as the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) to attack Nestlé for its promotion of baby formula over breast milk overseas. After a bitterly fought campaign, Nestlé eventually agreed to stop pushing its formula in 1984. Now, twenty years later, Nestlé was profiting off another product that the activists thought should be distributed for free, as one of the four largest bottled water producers along with European giant Danone (parent company of Evian), PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola.
If it seems a stretch to brand soft drinks as the next tobacco, then bottled water seems an even more unlikely villain. Here’s a product with no harmful tar or sugar, no addictive nicotine or caffeine. Yet CAI was affronted by the way in which the bottled water corporations were taking over local water supplies, often paying next to nothing for the privilege. In Nestlé’s case, the company was tapping underground aquifers around the United States, as citizens from Maine to California and Michigan to Texas complained about dried-up streams and dropping water levels around their plants. But at least Nestlé could legitimately call its “spring water” a unique beverage. Coke and Pepsi were bottling municipal tap water, passing ostensibly clean water through additional purification processes, and then selling it for a huge markup. Meanwhile, Coke’s huge advertising campaign touting Dasani’s “purity” further undermined public confidence in tap water, they argued, leading to more bottled water sales and less investment in public infrastructure.
By the time CAI began sounding the alarm in 2004, consumers were spending some $9 billion annually on bottled water in the United States, consuming an average of twenty-three gallons of the stuff per person (those numbers have since risen to $11 billion and twenty-nine gallons). Each year, sales increased by almost 10 percent—reminiscent of Goizueta-era Coke before the backlash over obesity began. In fact, as soft drinks started to decline in sales for the first time, Coke increasingly promoted water as a healthy alternative, spending tens of millions of dollars to rebrand itself as a “hydration” company, and replacing Coke signs with Dasani signs on the sides of vending machines. All of those marketing messages sunk in; a Gallup poll at the time found three in four Americans drank bottled water, and one in five drank only bottled water.
Despite its popularity, however, a growing body of evidence has shown bottled water to be no purer or safer than tap—and in some ways, potentially less safe. That’s because tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which imposes strict limits on contaminants and mandates daily testing and mandatory notification of problems. Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which by its own admission has set a “low priority” for regulating bottled water plants. Its standards are slightly lower on some contaminants, and it requires only weekly testing and voluntary recalls in the case of problems.
And sure enough, the benzene scare over Perrier and the bromate controversy in Britain are just the beginning of the problems with bottled water quality over the years. A classic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards). More recent studies have continued to find problems: In 2000, the American Medical Association found some bottled water had bacterial counts twice the level of tap. A 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee of brands including Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring found mercury, arsenic, and other chemicals above the EPA limits. A 2004 study by the FDA found low levels of perchlorate, a derivative of rocket fuel, in samples of spring water. As recently as 2008, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found thirty-eight different pollutants in bottled water, ranging from bacteria to fertilizer and Tylenol, and concluded that consumers “can’t trust that bottled water is pure or cleaner than tap water.” (The study did not reveal the types of water it tested, saying only that they were “popular” brands.)
That spotty safety record of bottled water doesn’t let tap off the hook. The same analysts at EWG found that tap water from forty-two states met federal standards for contaminants but still included a range of toxic goodies, including gasoline additives and endocrine disruptors, for which the government had not set limits. In early 2008, the Associated Press reported traces of pharmaceutical drugs and hormones in the water in twenty-four American cities, affecting 41 million people. True, the amounts were virtually microscopic—present in parts per billion or parts per trillion—but doctors cautioned even those small amounts can have effects with repeated exposure. “After learning about all the things that can go wrong with tap water, I don’t know what to think, or drink,” sighs Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania, a 2008 exposé of the bottled water industry.
Despite all of the conflicting studies and alarms, the truth is that in the United States, both tap water and bottled water are generally safe to drink. And that might be the most damning charge of all against bottled water, given the price difference between the two. On average, convenience-sized bottled water costs just over $2 per gallon, while tap water costs just one-or two-tenths of a cent per gallon—a difference of one thousand times. With statistics like these, it was only a matter of time, perhaps, before people began thinking what comedians from Dennis Miller to Janeane Garofalo have been telling us for years—that “Evian is just ‘naive’ spelled backward.”
Even as some newspaper stories questioning bottled water began to appear, however, the activists from CAI realized that none of the charges against bottled water would mean anything if they couldn’t address the issue of taste. The idea of the Tap Water Challenge grew out of a late-night brainstorming session in CAI’s Boston office in 2005, as the activists groped for a way to take the issue head-on. Not knowing what they’d find, they pitted the tap water in their office against bottles of Dasani and other brands; they were genuinely surprised to find that they couldn’t tell the difference.
In the early spring of 2006, CAI rolled out Tap Water Challenges in seven cities—including Boston, Austin, Minneapolis, and San Francisco—adding others every few weeks over the next six months. Everywhere they went, people were amazed to find they couldn’t distinguish between bottled and tap. Just as decades of advertising had convinced people they liked Coke Classic more than Pepsi or New Coke, it seemed the millions spent on branding bottled water had made people think it tasted fresher and purer than tap. And just like the Pepsi Challenge a generation earlier, the ready-made conflict of pitting two beverages against each other was irresistible to the media. Newspapers began running on-the-scene reports of die-hard Dasani or Aquafina drinkers chagrined to find they’d mistaken their favorites for Newark or Philadelphia tap water.
CAI’s Gigi Kellett, the national director of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, admits the group first chose cities they already knew had good water—including Boston and San Francisco, which pipe in water from reservoirs so pristine they don’t have to filter it. Soon, however, they realized they could hold them almost anywhere—even places such as South Florida that had a reputation for poor-tasting tap water. Oftentimes, the most skeptical taste-testers hadn’t tasted the water in years. When they held challenges in Miami—which sources its water from an underground aquifer before submitting it to a high-quality filtration and treatment system—they got the same results as anywhere else.
As awareness of the Tap Water Challenges spread, however, the activists found the issue that resonated most with consumers had less to do with the quality of the water, much less privatization and control of water resources. Instead, they were most concerned with the bottles themselves. In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore had just released the documentary An Inconvenient Tru
th, warning of the apocalyptic consequences of climate change and spurring consumers to measure their personal carbon footprints and carry canvas bags to the grocery store instead of wasting excess plastic. Likewise, there seemed something especially galling about wasting all of that plastic for a product that could just as easily be had from the tap. According to a 2009 report by the nonprofit Pacific Institute, it takes the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to produce the plastic for all bottled water consumed in the United States in a year—enough to power 1 million cars. Add in the cost of production and transport, and that number increases to between 34 and 58 million barrels. (And worldwide production takes three times that.)
Then there is disposal. Nationwide, the average container recycling rate was 33 percent in 2009, down from a high of more than 50 percent in 1992. Much of that decrease was due to the introduction of bottled water, which has doubled over the past decade to nearly 33 billion liters sold by 2008—nearly all of it in single-serving PET containers. Since bottled water containers have been recycled at notoriously low rates of less than 20 percent, the Washington, D.C.-based Container Recycling Institute concludes that these containers have brought the overall recycling rate down. Add it all up, CRI says, and that translates to some 3 billion pounds of plastic bottles in the waste stream each year. Bottled water companies, of course, dispute the notion that bottled water containers are more to blame than other products for plastic waste. According to Joe Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), PET bottles represent only a third of 1 percent (.0033) of all trash. “If you can get your head around that, it’s very clear that these efforts to target bottled water are misguided at best and totally ineffective in dealing with the problem at worst,” he says. In some ways, he has a point—what makes bottled water any worse than soda, juice, or beer, which also use plenty of water in their production and are nearly as likely to end up in the trash? And in an increasingly on-the-go society, isn’t it better for people to grab a bottle of water at the convenience store rather than a sugary soda?
The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink Page 14