You’ll be able to ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Singapore’s three-Michelin-starred Restaurant Zen.
But you will not get one.
The restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, only serves water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said Executive Chef Martin Öfner.
Dishes and drinks on the restaurant are created from the water too, from its stocks to the juices in its non-alcoholic beverage pairing, he said.
Zen is one among greater than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants that serve Nordaq water, company CEO Johanna Mattsson told CNBC Travel. The water, which is purified and bottled on-site using local tap water, can also be present in greater than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she said.
The corporate goals to cut back single-use water bottles within the hospitality industry — each the low-cost plastic variety commonly present in hotel rooms, to glass-bottled European mineral water served in higher-end restaurants. The latter can travel 1000’s of miles between its source to where it’s ultimately consumed.
“Transportation of water over water doesn’t make sense,” said Mattsson. “That is what we wish to eliminate.”
Nordaq’s bottles are free from plastic labeling in order that they will be easily washed and reused, they usually include wide mouths in order that they will be cleaned in regular dishwashers, she said.
Bottles are also securely capped and date-stamped after they’re refilled, said Mattsson.
Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had Nordaq’s water system on tap since 2023, with bottles present within the hotel’s rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.
Hotel Manager Cindy Kong let CNBC Travel tour its bottling facility to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the power can produce 500 bottles of purified water in an hour.
“Normally we process between 1,000 to 2,000 [bottles] day-after-day,” she said.
Nordaq is one among many corporations within the premium sustainable water business. Castalie water is present in greater than 700 hotels in France, based on its website, while Purezza water is served in greater than 5,000 venues across 13 countries, based on the corporate’s LinkedIn page.
The Indian hospitality company ITC Hotels created its own brand of “zero-mile” water called SunyaAqua to cut back single-use plastic bottles in its 140 hotels. “Every guilt-free sip is bottled in-house, eliminating the necessity for transport,” Latest Delhi’s ITC Maurya posted on Facebook in July.
Hospitality corporations are the core marketplace for the Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates inside hotels — with a facility opening soon in Rosewood Abu Dhabi — and thru centralized facilities.
Within the latter, Be WTR’s founder and CEO Mike Hecker said water may travel barely farther than ITC Hotel’s “zero mile” water, but not by much.
“We don’t desire to move greater than 10 kilometers around our bottling facility, because, as you well know, carbon footprint … is very impacted by transport,” he told CNBC. “We attempt to be positioned at the purpose of consumption as much as we will.”
The corporate’s primary operations are within the United Arab Emirates, however the water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansions into Canada and China, said Hecker. The corporate closed a $44 million round of Series C funding in October.
Be WTR will be present in hotels as varied as Le Bristol Paris, opened in 1925, to The Standard Singapore (here), which opened nearly 100 years later in December 2024.
Source: The Standard, Singapore
Be WTR signed a worldwide agreement with Accor to be a preferred partner for the French hospitality company’s luxury hotel brands.
“We’re the primary company to have a worldwide water agreement targeting [Accor’s] five-star brands, equivalent to the Raffles, Pullman [and] Sofitel,” he said.
Less waste, higher profit
Corporations that provide the tourism and food industries with no- or low-transport filtered water say they save thousands and thousands of plastic bottles from getting used every 12 months. But they’ve one other selling point — they’ll generate a profit for his or her clients too.
Be WTR’s Hecker said its first bottling plant at Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi saved “over a million imported bottles a 12 months. And it is a considerable achievement, each in … carbon footprint, but additionally in creating positive profit for our client.”
CNBC’s Travel Editor Monica Pitrelli samples Nordaq water with CEO Johanna Mattsson. A running tally on Nordaq’s website says the corporate has saved some 5.7 billion plastic bottles from getting used, a statistic based on data extracted from the corporate’s bottling facilities, the corporate said.
Source: Zap PR
Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR sells for, but said it’s “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 provide. However the water sells for rather more. The Providore Singapore sells free-flow still and sparkling Nordaq water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge 4 times that price for a single bottle.
Purezza estimates each of its bottles cost around 30 cents to provide, or about one-fifth the value of standard bottled water, based on an organization sales brochure. But each will be sold for a similar price, based on the brochure, which estimated that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold at $5 per bottle could generate $13,200 in annual profit for the vendor.
