You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Singapore’s three-Michelin-starred Zen Restaurant.
But don’t get one.
The restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, serves only water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said executive chef Martin Öfner.
The dishes and drinks at the restaurant are also made from water, from their stocks to the juices in their pairing of non-alcoholic drinks, 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 featured 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 European glass-bottled mineral water served in the top restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of kilometers between its source and where it is ultimately consumed.
“Transporting water over water makes no sense,” said Mattsson. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq’s bottles are free of plastic labeling so they can be easily washed and reused, and come with wide mouths so they can be cleaned in regular dishwashers, he said.
The bottles are also securely capped and stamped with the date after they have been filled, Mattsson said.
Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had the Nordaq water system since 2023, with bottles present in hotel rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.
Hotel Manager Cindy Kong allowed CNBC Travel to visit her bottling facility to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the facility can produce 500 bottles of purified water in an hour.
“We normally process between 1,000 to 2,000 (bottles) every day,” he said.
Nordaq is one of many companies in the premium sustainable 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 premises 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 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 core market for the Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates in 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 that water can travel a little further than ITC Hotel’s “zero mile” water, but not much.
“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling facility, because, as you know, the carbon footprint … is greatly affected by transportation,” he told CNBC. “We try to be located 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 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 varied as Le Bristol Paris, opened in 1925, to the Standard Singapore (here), which opened almost 100 years later in December 2024.
Source: The Standard, Singapore
Be WTR has signed a global agreement with Accor to be a preferred partner for the French hospitality company’s luxury hotel brands.
“We are the first company to have a global water agreement targeting five-star (Accor) 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 transport say they save millions of plastic bottles from being used each year. But they have another selling point – they can also generate a profit for their customers.
Be WTR’s Hecker said that its first bottling plant in Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi has saved “more than one million imported bottles a year. And this is a considerable achievement, both in … carbon footprint, but also in creating positive profit for our client”.
CNBC travel editor Monica Pitrelli tests the Nordaq waters 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 bottling facilities, 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 its water costs between 11 cents and 21 cents to produce. But water sells for much more. Providore Singapore sells free-flowing, 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 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 be sold for the same price, according to the brochure, which estimates that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold at $5 per bottle could generate $13,200 in annual profit for the seller.
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2024-12-31 09:04:00
