You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Singapore’s three-Michelin-starred Zen restaurant.
But you won’t get it.
The restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, serves only water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said executive chef Martin Öfner.
The restaurant’s meals and drinks are also made from water, from stock to juices combined with soft 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 – from the cheap plastic types commonly found in hotel rooms to the European mineral water in glass bottles served in high-end restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles from its source to where it is finally consumed.
“Transporting water over water makes no sense,” Mattsson said. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq’s bottles have no plastic labels so they can be easily washed and reused, and they come with a wide opening so they can be washed in regular dishwashers, she said.
The bottles are also securely capped and dated after refilling, Mattsson said.
Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had a Nordaq water system since 2023, with bottles in hotel rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.
Hotel manager Cindy Kong allowed CNBC Travel to tour the bottling plant to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the plant can produce 500 bottles of purified water per hour.
“We usually process between 1,000 and 2,000 of them [bottles] every day,” she said.
Nordaq is one of many companies in the cutting edge 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 locations 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. “Each remorse-free sip is bottled in-house, eliminating the need for transportation,” New Delhi-based ITC Maurya posted on Facebook in July.
Hospitality companies are a key market for the Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates within hotels – with a facility soon to open in Rosewood Abu Dhabi – and through centralized facilities.
In the latter case, Be WTR founder and CEO Mike Hecker said the water might travel a bit further than the ITC Hotel’s “zero mile” water, but not much.
“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling plant because, as you well know, transportation has a huge impact on the carbon footprint,” 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 Series C funding round in October.
Be WTR can be found in hotels as diverse 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 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 [Accor’s] five-star brands, such as Raffles, Pullman [and] Sofitel,” he said.
Less waste, more profit
Companies that supply tourism and the food industry with filtered water with little or no transport say they are saving millions of plastic bottles each year. But they have another selling advantage — they can make a profit for their clients as well.
Be WTR’s Hecker said its first bottling plant at the Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi has saved “more than a million imported bottles per year. And this is a significant achievement, both in … carbon footprint and in generating a positive profit for our client. “
CNBC Travel Editor Monica Pitrelli tastes Nordaq water with CEO Johanna Mattsson. Data on Nordaq’s website says the company has saved about 5.7 billion plastic bottles from use, a statistic based on data pulled from the company’s bottling plants, the company said.
Source: Zap PR
Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR sells for, but said it is “price competitive” with bottled mineral water from Europe.
Nordaq’s Mattsson says each bottle of his water costs between 11 and 21 cents to produce. But water is sold for much more. Providore Singapore sells Nordaq free-flow 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 be sold at the same price, according to the brochure, which estimates that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold at $5 a bottle could generate $13,200 in annual revenue for the retailer.
