10 Dec 2014 PET brought the bottled water revolution
People of a certain age can certainly remember a time when bottled water was a unique proposition in the United States and it certainly was not plastic.
PET has, for years now, been used in the single-serve water bottle market, propelling it to heights once unthinkable.
But the early days of the business was actually dominated by glass as brands like Perrier and Evian stormed the shores from Europe, showing Americans that drinking water doesn’t have to come exclusively from the tap.
Those days of the ’80s soon gave way to the early ’90s when plastic started asserting itself in the market. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“I think one of the remarkable things, when you go back to the 1980s, the single-serve bottle water category was virtually non-existent at that point,” said Gary Hemphill, MD and COO of research and consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp. “The concept of water as a refreshment beverage crept into the human psyche in the 1980s when you had fancy imports come into the market like Evian and Perrier,” Hemphill said, in glass bottles.
Single-serve bottled water, for much of two decades, then went on a tear. Year after year, the segment experienced robust growth without fail.
For 16 consecutive years, through 2007, single-serve plastic water bottles enjoyed double-digit percentage expansion.
“The growth rates were routinely north of 20 percent annually for many years through the early ’90s up until well into the 2000s,” Hemphill remembered.
Then the Great Recession hit, causing growth to slow considerably in 2008, according to the International Bottled Water Association, before actually falling in 2009.
A recent story in Bottled Water Reporter, published for the association, indicates the single-serve PET segment of the bottled water industry has grown every year since 2009 and reached 6.7 billion gallons in the US last year.
“The category is growing again. So it’s been a fairly remarkable performance,” Hemphill said.
Growth of bottled water — where the single-serve container accounts for about two-thirds of the market — has Hemphill’s BMC predicating that it will surpass carbonated soft drinks as the biggest category on a volume basis in the US in three or four years.
Ron Puvak, director of marketing and new business development at Plastic Technologies., has been around plastic water bottles for a long time. His Holland, Ohio-based company provides plastic packaging design and testing.
“There was a time where I thought none of us thought Americans would ever drink bottled water to be blunt. It took the Nestles and Perriers of the world to start that process here,” he said. “So from that perspective, the rise has been surprising.”
Puvak even remembers a time when the plastic water bottle story was not a tale of PET success…..