The Vexing Issue of Regulating Makers of Bottled Water

It is difficult to imagine a more confusing label than the one affixed to the bottles of the Koala Springs beverages that were the subject of a nationwide recall late last year after health officials in Florida detected traces of benzene in random samples.

Start with the name, invented to evoke the beverage’s Australian corporate parentage. “To the best of my knowledge, there is no such place as Koala Springs. It does not exist,” said Claudia Beville, a staffer on the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, which is probing the bottled water industry.

Next, consider the gold seal bearing the words “Australian Export Award” and a map of the continent.

Export? Koala Springs is manufactured in plants in Sacramento, Stockton and Columbus, Ohio. Although the fruit concentrate comes from Australia, the water, the bottles, the caps, the high-fructose corn syrup, the citric acid and the sodium benzoate (as preservative) are born in the U.S.A., company officials say.

Finally, examine the text: “A blend of natural mineral water” and fruit juice. Nowhere does the label say “soft drink” or “soda pop,” which is what most experts say Koala Springs is.

“In California, Koala Springs products are legally soft drinks. . . . A bottled water may not contain sugars, syrups, acidulants or preservatives,” said Jack Sheneman, food and drug scientist for the state Department of Health Services. “It is a contaminated food product, not a bottled water.”

Oh. What, then, is a bottled water? A simple question, right? Wrong. The answer depends on whom--and where--you ask. Florida regulators, for example, say Koala Springs is a bottled water.

Confused? Don’t expect any help from product names. By most definitions, Coors Sparkling Water with fruit flavoring is considered a bottled water, while Clearly Canadian Sparkling Water with fruit flavoring is not. (The tip-off: Clearly Canadian contains sugar.)

Think you understand? Then let’s move onto “sparklers.” The Sundance Sparkler ocontains just fruit juice and carbonated water; the Tropicana Sparkler contains those ingredients plus fructose. Answer: Neither is considered bottled water because each contains fruit juice.

Is all that clear? If you’re still perplexed, don’t worry--you’re in good company. No less a source than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is so vexed by the question that it has never issued standards for mineral water (though it has for other kinds of bottled water). Try as it might, the agency hasn’t been able to come up with a definition for the stuff.

“We’ve been trying to do something about mineral water for years,” admitted Terry Troxell of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The debate revolves around the level and identity of the minerals, a debate California settled when it decreed that mineral water must contain 500 parts per million of dissolved solids.

Not to worry, says the FDA. Troxell insists that even in the absence of specific standards, consumers of mineral water are “afforded strong protection” by general FDA rules requiring manufacturers to produce safe, wholesome and truthfully labeled products.

But with six recalls of bottled water-type products in 1990, including the worldwide withdrawal of France’s Perrier for benzene contamination, some consumers who turned to bottled water to escape suspected perils in their municipal water supplies may be having second thoughts.

And that, in turn, worries the International Bottled Water Assn., the Alexandria, Va.-based trade association for the $2-billion, 1.8-billion-gallon-a-year industry. The industry, which is promoting its own regulatory scheme to preserve consumer confidence, believes that it is getting a bum rap.

To begin with, the trade association insists that Koala Springs and Wallaroo, two of the beverages found to have benzene in them, aren’t even bottled water.

“Nothing would make our industry happier than to get these companies that are adding juice and sugar away from our industry,” says Geary Campbell, a spokeswoman for the association.

Dennis Weil, director of marketing at Koala Springs International Inc., acknowledges under questioning that the product is not bottled water and that “there is no such location” as Koala Springs.

Still, he defends the company’s marketing. “There are a lot of product names that may imply certain things,” Weil says. “But it is just a name.”

Weil isn’t kidding. There are a lot of fanciful brand names, and some adorn what is undisputedly bottled water. Consider three Texas brands--”Country Fresh,” “Oasis” and “Apple Tree.” All have labels featuring bucolic country scenes, and all consist of water drawn from Houston’s municipal supply and treated.

“Those who are familiar with the Houston metropolitan area can assure you that the city of Houston is certainly not an ‘oasis,’ nor could it be described as a ‘country-fresh’ location,” Irina Cech said dryly. She is professor of environmental health and hydrology at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston’s School of Public Health.

Cech, who presented testimony to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’ Workshop on the Quality and Safety of Bottled Water in September, said that “at prices ranging from 79 cents a gallon of domestic brands to $9.63 for imported brands . . . the consumer needs to know more about the product than the label provides.”

But to William Deal, executive vice president of the International Bottled Water Assn., “it is not in the least bit misleading” to give water the brand name of “Country Fresh”--as long as the label also indicates that the water is from Houston’s municipal water supply.

“It’s like having some fat Italian lady on a package of pasta when the pasta is made in Los Angeles,” he says.

The industry also notes that many of the products that required recalls were imported and fizzy--not the domestic still water that made up 1.6 billion of the 1.8 billion gallons of bottled water sold in the United States last year. (Domestic sparkling water sales were 137 million gallons and imported brands 55 million gallons.)

Who drinks bottled water, and why? Westerners were the most likely consumers of still bottled, with 20.8% of households buying the stuff, compared to 15.1% nationally and 10% in the central states, according to a consumer survey by Tandem Probe Inc. of Mahwah, N.J.

Nationally, 57.7% buy the product because they believe that it tastes better than tap water, while 36.2% think that it is safer.

In any case, folks are guzzling the stuff. The 1.8 billion gallons sold last year--7.4 gallons per capita--was up from 1 billion in 1985, according to Beverage Marketing Corp. in New York.

Growth has been so strong that municipal utilities providing tap water are fighting back. Norman E. Murrell, legislative chairman of the Long Island Water Conference, a group of municipal utilities in New York, is leading the charge.

“On Long Island, we test our tap water for 188 parameters, including organic chemicals, heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides,” he says. “Despite the image of bottled water, there isn’t the same level of testing required for bottled water.”