Perrier’s Back in Promotional Blitz : Food safety: Despite screening, questions remain about the safety and purity of all bottled waters.
Perrier, the sparkling water that was voluntarily recalled in February for traces of benzene contamination, is returning to the American market with a nine-city promotional blitz.
By the end of June, Perrier should be available nationwide.
“Unequivocally, at this time Perrier is the most stringently tested bottled water sold anywhere in the world,” says Kim E. Jeffery, senior vice president for sales and marketing of the Perrier Group of America, who is touring the United States to regain consumer confidence in the product. “We are doing much more frequent testing as well as backup quality control.”
But despite the everything-is-OK public relations effort, politicians and regulators are questioning whether bottled water is as safe and as pure as the image the Madison Avenue promoters have created. Even the International Bottled Water Assn., a trade association that represents 85% of the industry, including Perrier, is asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for stricter testing standards.
Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for the Committee on Energy and Commerce, is considering holding public hearings on the bottled water industry’s marketing and quality control practices.
The concerns:
It took six months to discover that Perrier was contaminated with traces of benzene, a chemical known to cause cancer in animals. Although bottled water is supposed to be inspected by state and federal officials, the contamination was discovered by a North Carolina laboratory that was using Perrier as a standard of purity in tests for municipal water quality.
The incident also brought into question Perrier’s use of “naturally sparkling”--a description the FDA called misleading because the water is not carbonated (it comes from the spring). The water and the carbon dioxide from a natural gas reservoir beneath the spring are combined in the factory after impurities from the gas, including benzene, are filtered out. New labels, required after July 30, will say “Natural Mineral Water” and explain that the carbonation is taken from a naturally occurring source deep within the Earth.
Although the company agreed to change its labeling, Jeffery maintains that the original labeling was not misleading. FDA never defined “naturally sparkling,” he says, and Perrier’s use of the term complies with European definitions.
But Dingell’s letter to the other regulating agency, the Federal Trade Commission, says that Perrier’s new wording may still be misleading. He has asked the FTC to provide information on how the agency has handled the company’s labeling and advertising practices.
Likewise, he has asked the Food and Drug Administration to answer specific questions on the Perrier incident and general questions on the regulation and inspection of the $2.6 billion-a-year bottled water industry.
“Sometimes raising questions and getting people to answer is beneficial even if there are no hearings,” said a spokesman for the energy and commerce committee. “The agencies will go back and ask the same questions.”
The FDA already has begun asking questions.
“As a result of the Perrier incident a lot of questions that have been raised, we are in the process of issuing a program survey to pick up samples of domestic and imported bottled water,” says Allen Halper, assistant to the director in FDA’s Division of Regulatory Guidance. “We will be looking at (the samples) biologically and chemically and will be reviewing the labels.”
FDA does not routinely screen bottled water for purity and officials said that they could not give figures on the percentage of bottled water that is tested each year. Typically, samples of bottled water are picked up only if the agency has received consumer complaints or if questionable practices are discovered during routine plant inspections.
Bottled waters are required to pass the same general purity requirements as tap water, including tests for a series of substances from arsenic to zinc. But these tests do not screen for other toxic substances, including benzene.
“They are minimum quality standards, not levels of safety,” Halper says.
In fact, mineral water products, including Perrier, do not have to comply with these standards. Although the agency had intended to issue separate mineral water standards in the 1970s, priorities and resources changed, according to Halper.
But lack of standards doesn’t mean the FDA is helpless if a mineral water is contaminated or unsafe.
“The law says the agency can take action if we find a poisonous or deleterious substance in any food and that includes mineral water,” Halper says.
How well the bottled water standards are enforced is often left up to the states.
But critics are concerned. As consumption of bottled water grows, more and more states are considering the federal standards inadequate and are adopting regulations based on the model code of the International Bottled Water Assn. This model code includes standards for mineral water as well as maximum levels for benzene, vinyl chloride and carbon tetrachloride, contaminants not included in the FDA regulations.
California, New York and Florida are among the 13 states that have adopted the International Bottled Water Assn. model code, with Arizona and New Jersey in the rule-making process. Another 13 states are considering the stricter standards.
The trade association petitioned the FDA in 1979, 1983 and 1988 to set standards for mineral water and to expand current regulations with more stringent requirements for labels, contaminant testing and good manufacturing practices. William Deal, vice president of the trade association, says that he hopes the Perrier incident will provide impetus so that the FDA adopts stricter standards. Perrier also supports the more stringent standards.
“Bottled water is a growing industry and we feel that the consumer must have protection,” Deal says. “We feel that bottled water should exceed the standards for the public water supply. The problem is the federal government has not seen it to be an important issue.”
