Perrier’s Poland Spring Is Gusher as No. 1

Poland Spring--the health spa--had its heyday in the Gilded Age. Summer guests from around the world journeyed by steamer, train and coach to drink healing waters in the bucolic Maine countryside.

A century later, Poland Spring--the bottled water--is enjoying its own golden age amid America’s continuing love affair with water that comes from a plastic container instead of a tap.

America’s No. 1 brand for three years in a row, Poland Spring is growing faster than the overall bottled water industry, with no sign of slowing despite increasing competition. The company’s sales last year totaled $406 million, up more than 15 percent from 1998.

To meet soaring demand, the company is spending up to $100 million on a second bottling plant in Hollis, Maine, about 35 miles from the original Poland Spring.

“There’s plenty of water at the original site. But the (old) plant is huge, almost 500,000 square feet, and it’s difficult to run logistically,” said Kim Jeffery, president and chief executive officer of Perrier Group of America, which owns Poland Spring.

The existing plant, about 1,000 feet from the spring, will supply an estimated 220 million gallons this year to the Northeast, Atlanta and Chicago. It is among the largest plants of its type, surpassing the biggest soft-drink plants and approaching the size of the biggest breweries, Jeffery said.

New Plant Site Hosted Organic Potatoes, Trees

The company’s growth has been fed by sales of water in portable plastic bottles that came into vogue around 1990, allowing Poland Spring to become a fixture in delis, health clubs, convenience stores and vending machines. Until then, most of the water was sold in larger containers, like office coolers and gallon jugs.

The company considered out-of-state locations for its new plant but ultimately decided to stick with Maine. Geologist Kristin Tardif led the exhaustive search for a sand and gravel aquifer that yielded water whose taste and mineral content mirrored that found at Poland Spring.

It is the mineral content that gives water from different locations its special taste. Some say water that is completely stripped of its mineral content is bland by comparison.

So Tardif explored 48,000 acres in southern Maine on foot and even more from the air, sometimes dangling outside a helicopter in a safety harness with binoculars and an infrared camera.

Poland Spring finally settled on a 1,400-acre site in Hollis that included an organic potato farm and surrounding forests. After researching the land’s historic uses to ensure the purity of the ground water, the company began construction last year and hopes to open the first production lines in June.

The big plans mark a complete turnaround from 1980, when Poland Spring, wallowing in bankruptcy, was acquired by France’s Source Perrier, producer of what is arguably the world’s best-known brand of water. Perrier is now owned by the international food company Nestle SA.

Perrier Group of America, based in Greenwich, Conn., controls nearly a third of the market and has five of the top eight brands in the United States, including the No. 2 seller, Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water. Perrier’s western regional offices are in Brea. The water comes from a site north of San Bernardino. The company’s other leading brands include Calistoga, Zephyrhills, Deer Park and Ozarka.

The industry is likely to see increased consolidation, according to Gary Hemphill, vice president, information services, for Beverage Marketing Corporation of New York City, a consulting service for the industry.

Hemphill predicts Perrier Group will remain among the leaders because of its brands and its low-cost production.

Spring Waters Compete Against Purified

Brands

But the company still faces tough competition. As sales growth for soft drinks has slowed, the nation’s biggest beverage makers are putting their marketing and distribution muscle behind their entries in the bottled water field. Pepsi-Cola’s Aquafina was launched in 1995 and has become the No. 3 seller; Coca-Cola weighed in last May with Dasani, also off to a fast start.

Poland Spring and Perrier Group’s other brands do have a marketing edge. The national brands, bottled at plants throughout the country, are purified waters, as opposed to the Perrier Group’s spring waters that are linked to a specific location, lending an aura of authenticity.

“With Poland Spring, so much of its image is tied to its natural spring source,” said Perrier spokeswoman Jane Lazgin, who maintains that purified waters don’t measure up to the product that comes up from the ground in Maine.

Others may be less discerning. “For the most part, people are buying refreshment and they’re buying purity,” Hemphill said.

Although Perrier is investing in Poland Spring’s future, it also is spending millions of dollars to preserve the company’s storied past. The historic Spring House is to be restored in one project. The house is the site of the original spring, whose water was prized by Indians and 18th-century travelers for its healing powers.

The company wants to create a museum, to be known as Poland Spring Preservation Park, around the Spring House, where visitors can see where the water flows up through fissures in the rock. The setting may be America’s closest counterpart to Source Perrier, the famed spring in the south of France.

The Ricker family that founded the Poland Spring company settled at the site, which went on to become a world-famous resort. They began bottling Poland Spring water in 1845, delivering three-gallon ceramic crocks by wagon. By the turn of the century, trains and ships transported the water to customers worldwide.

The planned museum is intended to capture the grandeur of the old buildings and show how the bottling operation was carried out a century ago.

“For a long time we’ve had the dream of doing this, but it was only in the last five years that the company was doing well enough that we could think about using capital to bring this place back to the way it was,” Perrier’s Jeffery said.