At Singapore’s three-Michelin-star restaurant Zen, you can order a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino.
But you can’t have it.
Executive chef Martin Offner said the restaurant charges nearly $500 per person for dinner and only serves water from the Swedish company Nordaq.
The restaurant’s food and drinks are also made from water, from stock to non-alcoholic juices.
Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants that serve Nordaq Water, company CEO Joanna Mattsson told CNBC Travel. The water is purified and bottled on-site using local tap water and is also present in more than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she said.
The company aims to eliminate in the hospitality industry both the cheap plastic disposable water bottles commonly found in hotel rooms and the glass bottles of European mineral water served in upscale restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles from its source to its final point of consumption.
“Transporting water on water doesn’t make sense,” Mattson said. “That’s something we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq bottles don’t have plastic labels, so they can be easily washed and reused, and the wide mouth means they can be washed in a regular dishwasher, she said.
After the bottles are refilled, they are kept securely capped and date engraved, Mattson said.
Mandarin Oriental, Singapore will be installing a Nordaq water system from 2023, with bottles stocked in hotel rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.
Hotel manager Cindy Conn gave CNBC Travel a tour of the bottling facility to see how the bottles are cleaned, inspected, filled and sealed. He said the facility can produce 500 bottles of purified water per hour.
“Typically, we process 1,000 to 2,000 bottles every day,” she said.
Nordaq is one of many companies involved in the sustainable premium water business. According to the company’s website, Castalie water is served in more than 700 hotels in France, and Purezza water is served in more than 5,000 properties in 13 countries, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.
Indian hospitality company ITC Hotels has created its own ‘zero mile’ water brand called SunyaAqua to reduce single-use plastic bottles across its 140 hotels. “All guilt-free drinks are bottled in-house and do not require transportation,” New Delhi’s ITC Maurya posted on Facebook in July.
Hospitality companies are the core market for Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. Although it operates within hotels and will soon open a facility at Rosewood Abu Dhabi, it operates through a centrally managed facility.
At the latter, Be WTR founder and CEO Mike Hecker said the water may reach slightly further than the ITC Hotel’s “zero mile” water, but not by much.
“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around the bottling facility because, as you know, the carbon footprint is heavily influenced by transportation,” he told CNBC. “We try to be as close to the point of consumption as possible.”
The company’s main operations are in the United Arab Emirates, but its water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansions into Canada and China, Hecker said. The company closed a $44 million Series C funding round in October.
Be WTR can be found in hotels ranging from Le Bristol Paris, which opened in 1925, to The Standard Singapore (here), which opened in December 2024, almost 100 years later.
Source: The Standard, Singapore
Be WTR has signed a global agreement with French hospitality company Accor to become its preferred partner for its luxury hotel brands.
“We were the first company to sign a global water agreement covering (Accor’s) five-star brands such as Raffles, Pullman (and) Sofitel,” he said.
Reduce waste and increase profits
Companies that supply the tourism and food industries with filtered water that requires no or little transport say they are saving millions of plastic bottles each year. But they have another selling point. That means customers can benefit as well.
Be WTR’s Hecker says the first bottling plant at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi has saved clients “more than a million imported bottles a year, which is also a positive benefit for our clients in terms of carbon footprint.” It is also a considerable achievement in terms of generating profits.”
CNBC Travel Editor Monica Pitrelli joins CEO Joanna Mattsson to sample the waters of Nordaq. The latest tally posted on Nordaq’s website claims the company has saved the use of approximately 5.7 billion plastic bottles, a statistic based on data extracted from the company’s bottling facilities. the company said.
Source: Zapp PR
Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR sells for, but said it is “competitively priced” compared to glass-bottled mineral waters in Europe.
Nordaq’s Mattson said the company’s manufacturing costs for each water bottle range from 11 cents to 21 cents. But water sells for much more than that. Providor Singapore sells free-flowing still water and sparkling Nordaq water for $2 per person, while a bottle costs four times that in some luxury hotels.
According to the company’s sales brochure, Purezza estimates the bottle costs about 30 cents to make, or about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water. However, the brochure estimates that both can be sold for the same price, and that by selling 1,000 bottles of Purezza water at $5 each, the seller could earn an annual profit of $13,200.
