The world’s top hotels and restaurants are changing how they serve water

You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Singapore’s three-Michelin-starred Restaurant Zen.

But you won’t get one.  

The restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, only serves water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said Executive Chef Martin Öfner.

Dishes and drinks at the restaurant are made from the water too, from its stocks to the juices in its non-alcoholic beverage pairing, he said.

Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants that serve Nordaq water, company CEO Johanna Mattsson told CNBC Travel. The water, which is purified and bottled on-site using local tap water, is also present in more than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she said.  

The company aims to reduce single-use water bottles in the hospitality industry — both the cheap plastic variety commonly found in hotel rooms, to glass-bottled European mineral water served in higher-end restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles between its source to where it is ultimately consumed.

“Transportation of water over water doesn’t make sense,” said Mattsson. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”

Nordaq’s bottles are free from plastic labeling so that they can be easily washed and reused, and they come with wide mouths so that they can be cleaned in regular dishwashers, she said.

Bottles are also securely capped and date-stamped after they are refilled, said Mattsson.  

Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had Nordaq’s water system on tap since 2023, with bottles present in the hotel’s rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.

Hotel Manager Cindy Kong let CNBC Travel tour its bottling facility to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the facility can produce 500 bottles of purified water in an hour.

“Normally we process between 1,000 to 2,000 [bottles] every day,” she said.

Nordaq is one of many companies in the premium sustainable water business. Castalie water is present in more than 700 hotels in France, according to its website, while Purezza water is served in more than 5,000 venues across 13 countries, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.

The Indian hospitality company ITC Hotels created its own brand of “zero-mile” water called SunyaAqua to reduce single-use plastic bottles in its 140 hotels. “Every guilt-free sip is bottled in-house, eliminating the need for transport,” New Delhi’s ITC Maurya posted on Facebook in July.

Hospitality companies are the core market for the Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates inside hotels — with a facility opening soon in Rosewood Abu Dhabi — and through centralized facilities.

In the latter, Be WTR’s founder and CEO Mike Hecker said water may travel slightly farther than ITC Hotel’s “zero mile” water, but not by much.  

“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling facility, because, as you well know, carbon footprint … is highly impacted by transport,” he told CNBC. “We try to be located at the point of consumption as much as we can.”

The company’s main operations are in the United Arab Emirates, but the water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansions into Canada and China, said Hecker. The company closed a $44 million round of Series C funding in October.

Be WTR signed a global agreement with Accor to be a preferred partner for the French hospitality company’s luxury hotel brands.

“We are the first company to have a global water agreement targeting [Accor’s] five-star brands, such as the Raffles, Pullman [and] Sofitel,” he said.

Companies that supply the tourism and food industries with no- or low-transport filtered water say they save millions of plastic bottles from being used every year. But they have another selling point — they can generate a profit for their clients too.

Be WTR’s Hecker said its first bottling plant at Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi saved “over one million imported bottles a year. And this is a considerable achievement, both in … carbon footprint, but also in creating positive profit for our client.”

Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR sells for, but said it’s “competitively priced” with glass-bottled mineral water from Europe.  

Nordaq’s Mattsson says each bottle of its water costs between 11 cents and 21 cents to produce. But the water sells for much more. The Providore Singapore sells free-flow still and sparkling Nordaq water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge four times that price for a single bottle.

Purezza estimates each of its bottles cost around 30 cents to produce, or about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water, according to a company sales brochure. But both can be sold for the same price, according to the brochure, which estimated that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold at $5 per bottle could generate $13,200 in annual profit for the seller.