A Drop Of Good Water

During dinner at Maceo near the Palais Royal in Paris recently we were served a very nice sparkling water in an elegant bottle that I hadn’t seen before, so being the marketing geek that I am, I read the label, expecting to find the usual mineral water gumph about protected springs, millennia of filtration through unsullied mountain rock etc etc. But there wasn’t any. Just an upfront explanation, telling me that Castalie is based on tap water from the local system, refined using an exclusive micro-filtration technology. They also explain that they’re obliged ‘for reasons that defeat reason’ to state that before it gushes from their Castalie water fountains, the water has been treated to make it ‘drinkable’.

The poetry comes in the second half of the copy, where we learn that Castalie has been created as an alternative to the bottled waters that are transported for kilometres before reaching your table … Castalie is produced ‘on demand’ and served still or sparkling (with the addition of a little CO2) to make it ‘well and truly a water from here and of today’.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across these types of instant bottled waters – several offices I’ve visited have had the same thing, usually in frosted flip-cap bottles that have seemed a bit grubby from lots of re-use – but it is the first time I’ve seen a high-end restaurant take a position against bottled mineral water to offer this kind of alternative. It takes a lot to turn your back on the massive margins that can come from serving super-premium mineral waters and to re-educate your consumers, so it’s a brave choice for the restaurants who’ve already chosen Castalie … a small disruption towards a more sustainable future, but a positive one nonetheless.

For more details, take a look at http://www.castalie.com