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You can order a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at the three-Michelin-starred Zen restaurant in Singapore.
But you won’t get one.
The restaurant, which charges almost $500 per person for dinner, only serves water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said executive chef Martin Öfner.
The restaurant’s dishes and drinks are also made with water, from its broths to the juices in its non-alcoholic drink pairing, he said.
Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants serving Nordaq water, company CEO Johanna Mattsson said. 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, he said.
The company aims to reduce single-use water bottles in the hospitality industry, both the cheap plastic variety commonly found in hotel rooms and the glass-bottled European mineral water served in upscale restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of kilometers from its origin to the place where it is finally consumed.
“Transporting water by water makes no sense,” says Mattsson. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq bottles have no plastic labels so they can be easily washed and reused, and they come with wide mouths so they can be cleaned in regular dishwashers, he said.
The bottles are also securely capped and date stamped after being refilled, Mattsson said.
Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had Nordaq’s tap water system since 2023, with bottles present in the hotel’s rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.
Hotel manager Cindy Kong allowed CNBC Travel to visit her bottling facility to see how bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. He said the facility can produce 500 bottles of purified water in an hour.
“We normally process between 1,000 and 2,000 (bottles) each day,” he said.
Nordaq is one of many companies in the sustainable premium water business. Castalie water is present in more than 700 hotels in France, according to its website, while Purezza water is served in more than 5,000 establishments in 13 countries, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.
Indian hospitality company ITC Hotels created its own “mile zero” water brand called SunyaAqua to reduce single-use plastic bottles across its 140 hotels. “Every guilt-free sip is bottled in-house, eliminating the need for transportation,” New Delhi-based 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 (a facility opening soon at Rosewood Abu Dhabi) and through centralized facilities.
On the latter, Be WTR founder and CEO Mike Hecker said the water can travel a little further than the ITC Hotel’s “mile zero” water, but not by much.
“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling facilities because, as you know, the carbon footprint… is greatly affected by transportation,” he told CNBC. “We try to be at the point of consumption 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 in Canada and China, Hecker said. The company closed a $44 million Series C funding round in October.
Be WTR can be found in hotels as varied as Le Bristol Paris, opened in 1925, to The Standard Singapore (here), opened almost 100 years later in December 2024.
Source: The Standard, Singapore
Be WTR signed a global agreement with Accor to be a preferred partner of the French hotel company’s luxury hotel brands.
“We are the first company to have a global water agreement targeting (Accor’s) five-star brands such as Raffles, Pullman (and) Sofitel,” he said.
Less waste, more profit
Companies that supply the tourism and food industries with filtered water with no or little transportation say they avoid the use of 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 Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi saved “more than a million imported bottles a year. And this is a considerable achievement, both in… carbon footprint, and in creating positive gains for our client.”
CNBC Travel Editor Monica Pitrelli tests the Nordaq waters with CEO Johanna Mattsson. An updated tally on Nordaq’s website says the company has prevented the use of about 5.7 billion plastic bottles, a statistic based on data pulled from the company’s bottling facilities, the company said.
Source: ZapPR
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 water costs between 11 and 21 cents to produce. But water sells for much more. Providore Singapore sells Nordaq still and sparkling 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 costs about 30 cents to produce, or about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water, according to one company. sales brochure. But both can sell for the same price, according to the brochure, which estimated that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold for $5 each could generate $13,200 in annual profit for the seller.
