You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at the three-star Zen Restaurant in Singapore.
But you won't find one.
The restaurant, which costs nearly $500 per person for dinner, only serves water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said CEO Martin Öfner.
The restaurant also has food and drinks made from water, from its stock to the juices in its couple of non-alcoholic drinks, he said.
Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants serving Nordaq water, said company CEO Johanna Mattsson CNBC Travel. The water, which is purified and bottled on site using local tap water, is also present in more than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she said.
The company aims to reduce single-use water bottles in the hospitality industry – both the cheap plastic variety commonly found in hotel rooms, to glass-bottled European mineral water served in top class restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles between its source and where it is ultimately consumed.
“Carrying water over water doesn't make sense,” Mattsson said. “That's what we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq bottles are free of plastic labels so they can be easily washed and reused, and they come with a wide mouth so they can be cleaned in regular dishwashers, she said.
Bottles are also securely capped and date-stamped after they are refilled, Mattsson said.
Mandarin Oriental Singapore has a Nordaq water system on tap from 2023, with bottles present in the hotel's rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.
Hotel Manager Cindy Kong let CNBC Travel tour its bottling facility to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the facility can produce 500 bottles of pure water in an hour.
“We usually process between 1,000 and 2,000 (bottles) per day,” she said.
Nordaq is one of many companies in the sustainable water industry. Castalie water is present in more than 700 hotels in France, according to its website, and Purezza water is served in more than 5,000 establishments in 13 countries, according to the company's LinkedIn page.
The Indian hospitality company ITC Hotels created its own brand of “zero-mile” water called SunyaAqua to reduce single-use plastic bottles in its 140 hotels. “Every guilt-free sip is bottled in-house, eliminating the need for transportation,” New Delhi's ITC Maurya posted on Facebook in July.
Hospitality companies are the main market for the Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates within hotels – with a facility opening soon in Rosewood Abu Dhabi – and through centralized facilities.
In the latter, Be WTR founder and CEO Mike Hecker said water may travel a bit further than ITC Hotel's “zero mile” water, but not by much.
“We don't want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling facility, because, as you know, transportation has a big impact on the carbon footprint…,” he told CNBC. “We try to be positioned at the consumption level as much as we can.”
The company's main operations are in the United Arab Emirates, but the water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansions into Canada and China, Hecker said. The company closed a $44 million round of Series C funding in October.
Be WTR can be found in hotels as diverse as Le Bristol Paris, which opened in 1925, to The Standard Singapore (here), which opened almost 100 years later in December 2024.
Source: The Standard, Singapore
Be WTR signed a global agreement with Accor to become the preferred partner for the French hospitality company's luxury hotel brands.
“We are the first company to have a global water agreement that targets five-star (Accor) brands, such as the Raffles, Pullman (and) Sofitel,” he said.
Less waste, higher profit
Companies that provide filtered water without movement or low transport to the tourism and food industries say they are saving millions of plastic bottles from being used each year. But they have another selling point – they can also generate profit for their clients.
WTR's Hecker said its first bottling plant at the Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi “saved over a million imported bottles every year.”
CNBC Travel Editor Monica Pitrelli samples Nordaq water with CEO Johanna Mattsson. A running tally on Nordaq's website says the company has saved about 5.7 billion plastic bottles from being used, a statistic based on data extracted from the company's bottle resources, the company said .
Source: Zap PR
Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR sells for, but said it is “competitively priced” with glass-bottled mineral water from Europe.
Nordaq's Mattsson says each bottle of his water costs between 11 cents and 21 cents to produce. But the water sells for much more. The Providore Singapore sells free flowing still and sparkling Nordaq water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge four times that price for a single bottle.
Purezza estimates that each of its bottles will cost about 30 cents to produce, or about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water, according to the company sales brochure. But both can be sold for the same price, according to the brochure, which estimated that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold at $5 per bottle could generate $13,200 in annual profit for the retailer.
