You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Singapore's three-Michelin-starred restaurant Zen.
But you won't get it.
The restaurant, where dinner costs almost $500 per person, serves only water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said chef Martin Öfner.
Dishes and drinks in the restaurant are also prepared with water – from broths to juices from non-alcoholic drinks, he added.
Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants that serve Nordaq Water, said company CEO Johanna Mattsson CNBC Travel. The water, which is purified and bottled on-site using local tap water, is also found in more than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she added.
The company's goal is to reduce single-use water bottles in the hospitality industry – both the cheap plastic varieties commonly found in hotel rooms and the European glass bottled mineral water served in upscale restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles between the source and the point of final consumption.
“Transporting water through water makes no sense,” Mattsson said. “That's what we want to eliminate.”
Nordaq bottles do not have plastic labels, so they can be easily washed and reused, and they also have wide necks, so they can be washed in regular dishwashers, she added.
The bottles are also securely closed and dated after refilling, Mattsson said.
Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had Nordaq water on tap since 2023, and bottles are available in hotel rooms, restaurants, spas and gyms.
Hotel manager Cindy Kong allowed CNBC Travel to tour the bottling plant to see how bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the plant could produce 500 bottles of purified water per hour.
“We typically process 1,000 to 2,000 (bottles) a day,” she said.
Nordaq is one of many companies operating in the sustainable premium water industry. Castalie Water is available 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 hotel company ITC Hotels has launched its own zero-mile water brand called SunyaAqua to reduce the number of single-use plastic bottles in its 140 hotels. “Every sip is bottled on site, eliminating the need for transportation,” New Delhi-based ITC Maurya wrote on Facebook in July.
Hospitality companies are the main market for Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates in hotels – opening soon at Rosewood Abu Dhabi – and through centralized facilities.
In the latter case, Be WTR founder and CEO Mike Hecker said the water may travel a little further than the “zero mile” water at the ITC hotel, but not by much.
“We don't want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling plant because, as you well know, transport has a big impact on the carbon footprint,” he told CNBC. “We try to be localized to the point of consumption as much as possible.”
The company's main operations are in the United Arab Emirates, but the water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansion into markets in Canada and China, Hecker said. In October, the company closed a $44 million Series C funding round.
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 has signed a global agreement with Accor to be the preferred brand partner of the French hospitality company.
“We are the first company to have a global water deal targeting five-star (Accor) brands such as Raffles, Pullman (and) Sofitel,” he said.
Less waste, more profit
Companies that supply the travel and food industries with low- or no-shipment filtered water say they save millions of plastic bottles every year. But they have one more advantage – they can also generate profit for their clients.
Be WTR's Hecker said its first bottling plant at Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi saved “over a million imported bottles a year. This is a significant achievement, both in terms of… carbon footprint and in terms of creating a positive profit for our client.”
CNBC travel editor Monica Pitrelli tests the Nordaq waters with CEO Johanna Mattsson. Current data posted on Nordaq's website shows the company has saved approximately 5.7 billion plastic bottles – a statistic based on data from the company's bottling plants, the company said.
Source: Zap PR
Hecker wouldn't say how much a bottle of Be WTR costs, but said it was “competitively priced” compared to European mineral water in glass bottles.
Nordaq's Mattsson says each bottle of water costs between 11 and 21 cents to produce. But water costs much more. At Providere Singapore, you can buy Nordaq free-flow still and sparkling water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge four times the price for a single bottle.
According to one company, Purezza estimates that each bottle costs about 30 cents to produce, or about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water. sales brochure. However, according to the brochure, which estimated that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold for $5 per bottle could generate an annual profit for the retailer of $13,200.