Water was always available on places where people lived. This is quite obvious - people need water, so it wouldn’t make sense to live far away from it. So… who had the idea of putting something that was largely available in bottles and selling it? I am pretty sure that this concept many years ago would sound like selling air today. Did the concept catch up easily?
I think it started with trendy imported spring water like Perrier, which by the latter 1980s was well-known enough to be spoofed in the movie Spaceballs.
I seem to recall it started about 20 years ago, or so.
The thing is, I have quite often bought bottled water because I don’t drink a lot of pop or other drinks. While on a road trip I’ll grab a bottle of water at the gas station, as opposed to pop or juice or sports drinks. It may not even be the cheapest drink available, if you can believe it, but it sure is more refreshing than the other options, for me anyway.
Bottled water has been around since there were bottles. Lots of the planet don’t have safe drinking water available, and bottled water enables the tourists, diplomatic corps and the like to survive. Perrier has been around since 1898. Evian since 1896. San Pelligrino since well before 1899.
Yes, but when did bottled water become something we all bought and drank, rather than something we made fun of?*
I don’t recall bottled water in my high school, and I graduated in 1992. There was a Coke machine, and we often got soda during rehearsals after school, but not yet water. There was a drinking fountain for that, and when you got thirsty enough, you walked to the drinking fountain and got a drink.
*Oh, yes, we did! If I had a dollar for every time I had a conversation with someone that went, “Can you believe they’re selling bottled water everywhere now? Not fancy water, just…water!” “I know! Crazy. Why the hell would I spend 99 cents on a bottle of water when I can get it out of the tap for nothin’?!” …well, I could buy a whole bunch of bottled water with those dollars.
According to this page, the earliest American bottled water was 1806.
That page indicates that bottled water was being imported from Europe before the end of the Revolutionary War.
As for the OP, I’d say that the bottled regular water thing took off about the same time that everybody* started going to the gym regularly.
-
- obviously not everybody, or America wouldn’t lead the world in obesity!
Our joke back then was “What is Evian spelled backwards?”
The explosion in plastic disposable bottles of water seemed to come from the water diet fad of what, maybe twenty years ago? Everyone went sippy sippy sippy all day, and the market noticed. It became so ingrained, and the notion that we would all die of dehydration cancer so universal, that water bottles are now permitted absolutely everywhere… even places that were always completely barred to food and drink. Plays. Opera. Classrooms.
Bottled water is the primary symptom of modern insanity, imvho. No, I’m not being rhetorical.
I don’t remember ordinary bottled water ( Poland Springs, Arrowhead etc) being available in individual servings when I finished college in 1986.Premium brands ( Perrier, San Pellegrino) and larger containers ( for water coolers or five gallon jugs) were around earlier. Around the time my kids started school in 1993, the individual bottles became available in convenience stores, and only later did I start seeing themin vending machines.
It was definitely sometime in the 1999-2002 time frame. I don’t remember bottled water being a thing when I was in college (1991-1996). People back then tended to get these huge-ass insulated mugs and fill them up with soda from the dining halls or snack bars on campus and take those to class.
But… once I moved to Dallas, it seems like shortly thereafter, everybody was wandering around with little pint bottles of water.
The only bottled water in central IN back in the 60s was distilled water, by the gallon, in returnable jugs. People used it in steam irons, mostly. Of course, there was seltzer and tonic water (available as mixers), but those aren’t exactly plain bottled water.
Back when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, Perrier water was around but it was an unusual product. Drinking Perrier or some other bottled water would have marked you as an eccentric.
I remember in the 1940s when companies like Culligan installed water dispensers in people’s homes, with big jugs (I think 8 gallon) balanced on top, in localities where the drinking water was not considered potable. Culligan was founded in 1938. In the 1940s, my grandmother’s house smelled like Milwaukee tapwater, which I found quite distasteful to drink.
I think the OP is referring to when it became fashionable for people with perfectly safe tapwater to buy bottled water , usually in the early days because they didn’t like the taste of the tapwater.
I worked at a bottled water company summer of '86 and '87. They trucked it in, bottled it, then had delivery drivers on routes. I was inside sales/customer service. We did have a lot of customers who preferred the 16 oz bottles and we sold those by the case. Usually it was little old rich grannies who couldn’t lift the big cooler bottles. Some families with lots of athletic kids. But it was definitely a luxury item. Most of our customers were either commercial, or wealthy residential. Regular people weren’t into it yet.
BTW, spring water is just water with the natural minerals still present and fluoride added to it. You can often find sediment in it. This freaks some people out because they expect it to be “clean”.
Drinking water is just reverse osmosis (filtered) well water. Nothing special. If you have well water, it’s probably what you’re already drinking. This is what most bottled water is.
Distilled is condensed steam from well water. There’s no minerals in it. It doesn’t taste real good. But some people feel this is the only truly pure H2O. And there are mechanical and industrial uses.
I don’t get the craze. I’m not going to turn to dust without hydration between home and my destination. It started in the mid 90’s. I blame helicopter soccer moms in competition to be the most prepared. Those kids grew up hanging onto those bottles like pacifiers. A generation of suckers. Ironically also the green generation.
Yes Lumpy. Then remember when Perrier got caught in some scandal, and they went away? I remember they had a significant share of the market up until that point.
I seem to remember bottled water getting big in the mid 90s. But watching old episodes of Cheers on Netflix, I’m seeing Sam and Diane drinking bottled water behind the bar in the early 80s.
Back in the early 70s in the UK it was a common held belief that the water in France and much of the rest of continental Europe was not safe to drink. Indeed bottled water was widely available in France and travellers were advised to drink it. Personally I doubt that this was still true of French water by that late date, more likely a mildly xenophobic suspicion of all things ‘foreign’, but drinking bottled was definitely part of the local culture. In 1978 on a school exchange trip I was reassured that my host family only drank from bottles, but then discovered they were filled from the tap and put in the refrigerator :smack:.
“Hi, Robin Williams here for Perrier. Whenever I blow a dollar on a bottle of water, I make it Perrier…”
-Robin Williams standup comedy album “Reality - What a Concept” was recorded in 1979. Of course that joke was much funnier then, when a dollar was a lot to spend and the idea of buying a bottle of water for that much money was considered pretentious, given that tap water was perfectly fine in most of North America.
This was not the case in many other places around the world, which is probably why purified wate, specifically for drinking, was distributed separately.
IIRC, just as Perrier was establishing itself as synonymous with pure bottled water, it came out that they were not properly cleaning their bottles. The cleaning process left traces of antifreeze(?) in the bottles. They had to pull their entire inventory off the shelves, and this gave an “in” to all the competing water companies.
If you’re asking about the 20-ounce bottles that compete with Coke, I don’t know the answer.
But if you’re asking about gallon jugs that compete with the municipal water supply, my grandparents in NYC kept it in their refrigerator as a staple product back in the 1960’s. It was Great Bear brand.