Bottoms Up, San Diego : City Gulps Bottled Water at Trendy Rate as Debate Swirls Over Taste, Safety of Tap Water

When Will Sniffin, head of water production for the City of San Diego, took a blindfold taste test early this year, he could not distinguish the city’s tap water from a snootier bottled brand.

Lots of people, however, apparently can.

In fact, recent marketing studies by the bottled water industry--the folks who bring you Sparkletts, Arrowhead, Perrier and other designer waters--have found that San Diegans may be the nation’s leading consumers of bottled water.

One in three San Diego residents drinks the stuff, according to the International Bottled Water Assn., compared with just one in 17 people nationally.

There is a consensus that San Diego is “the unofficial bottled water capital of the country,” as industry publicist Dennis Hunt put it. Southern California drinks about 45% of the bottled water quaffed in America, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp., an industry research firm, and America’s Finest City apparently rides the crest of that wave of consumption.

“Of all the cities in Southern California, the deepest penetration of bottled water service is in San Diego,” said Clem Wachner, communications director for Sparkletts Drinking Water Corp.

And that does not even count the thousands of homes in San Diego County that rely on filtration or reverse-osmosis systems to make tap water more potable.

Given that basic, home-delivered bottled water costs roughly 48 times more than the city’s Brand X--about $5 for a 5-gallon bottle versus 25 cents per ton of tap water--why do so many San Diegans buy it?

Many, it seems, consider municipal tap water here to be plain yucky.

A survey last year by Sparkletts found that only 30% of San Diego residents rated their tap water “good,” while 33% called it “fair” and 37% panned it as “poor.” Even Los Angeles water rated higher: 35% of those surveyed in Los Angeles said their water was “good” and 28% called it “poor.”

Sediment and discoloration cause some dissatisfaction, but Wachner said a chlorine-like taste or smell is cited most often by San Diegans who don’t like local tap water.

Cities use chlorine and other chemicals to kill bacteria in their water. Sparkletts and the other big bottlers use an oxygen process that leaves no chemical residues. Some of them then add secret blends of minerals to make their water yummy, while others rely on the natural mineral mix of their exclusive water sources.

Municipal water departments, on the other hand--with less than 1% of their water consumed and the rest put to a limitless variety of other uses--simply cannot put the emphasis on taste that water bottlers can, Wachner said.

“We don’t say city water is bad,” Wachner said. “We say the quality of our water is better and something you can be sure of. If you had to turn out the amount of water municipal suppliers do and make it all palatable, that’s one heck of a job.”

Sniffin could do without the magnanimity.

First off, he does not believe the bottled water industry’s estimates of their products’ popularity in San Diego.

In fact, the basis for the estimates by the International Bottled Water Assn. is a bit squishy. Bill Deal, executive vice president of the Alexandria, Va.-based group, said Monday that the one-in-three figure comes from Southern California water companies.

However, none of the Big Three water makers knew the source of any such numbers--not Sparkletts, Arrowhead or San Diego-based Silver Springs Water. An Arrowhead spokesman said the estimate “sounds a little high”; a Silver Springs official said one in four was a better guess of bottled water’s local popularity.

Furthermore, Sniffin contended, anybody who complains about traces of chlorine in San Diego’s water has not drunk any lately.

About three years ago, the water department stopped using straight chlorine to disinfect water, Sniffin said. Except for the first six months of this year, when chlorine use was temporarily resumed, the city has been using an odorless, flavorless, chlorine-ammonia compound to do the job.

No, Sniffin is not about to attribute bottled water use in San Diego to anything distasteful about the city’s product. “People here in San Diego go to bottled water because they want to get fluoride,” he said.

But the water bottlers have more rain to pour on the Water Utilities Department’s parade.

Besides taste issues, Southern Californians are highly sensitive to concerns about the safety of tap water, said Larry Fried, director of marketing for Arrowhead Drinking Water Co.

“The Southern California consumer . . . leads the nation in health consciousness,” he said. Consumers read stories like those last week about the shutting down of chemically tainted water wells in Hacienda Heights, Fried said, and they get on the horn to the bottled water companies.

“It used to be that you were attempting to peddle a luxury. That’s no longer the case with bottled water,” added Cindy Smith, coordinations manager for Silver Springs, which her grandfather founded in 1930 after he discovered the spring-fed wells in Ramona that remain the source of the company’s water today.

Sniffin insists there are no public health reasons to be concerned about San Diego’s water supply. “Our product does meet all the requirements of the state health department,” he said.

Sniffin even sees a silver lining in one of the qualities that make some people question the city’s water.

“Our water is hard, because we have a lot of Colorado River water, with a high salt content, relatively speaking,” he said. “Of course, there have been studies to say that’s good for you.”

That leaves one more explanation offered by the water bottlers as to the phenomenal popularity of their product in Southern California in general, and San Diego in particular.

Boiled down to its basics, the argument is that bottled water is an established part of the local mind-set--that it is quintessentially Californian, that those mountain streams and burping water bottles are a part of every Californian’s heritage.

“Several companies in Southern California are so well-known, so well-accepted, that if the sales person shows up at the door and says, ‘Would you like bottled water?’ you don’t question it,” Wachner said.

In San Diego, especially, the marketplace has been crowded with competitive bottlers, testing advertising and packaging, and expanding consumption with promotions and cut rates, according to Smith.

Add those local factors to a nationwide doubling of bottled water sales since 1975 and you get what might look like a fairly parched landscape for slingers of old-fashioned tap water.

Will Sniffin, though, refuses to get choked up.

“Personally, I like our water and I drink it fine,” he said. “Our family always has.”