The foods that make billions

A quick plug for a programme to be shown on BBC2 at 9.00 tonight - The Foods that make Billions. In the first of a 3-part series this is looking at the industry in selling bottled water - a market that didn’t exist until the 1980’s and is now worth billions of pounds a year - yet why do we pay so much for a product that we could get free (or virtually free) from the tap? Why do we pay for water that has been packaged in a plastic bottle made of an oil-derivative - thus combining two of the world’s scarcest resources? How could we justify paying up to £2 for half a litre of a resource which more than a billion people in the world struggle to get enough of to sustain their lives?

According to one commentator in the programme, we are buying choice and freedom, when we buy a bottle of water. The market was opened up thirty years ago by Perrier, with an advertising campaign that created the image of sophisticated, trend-setting, up and coming young business executives - and the campaign raised sales from 12 million bottles in 1980 to over 152 million by 1990. Would it work as well now, in our age of environmentalism, austerity, and fairness? Maybe not - but that is not the point, as now the product is established to the point that, if we worry about the logic of buying plastic-bottled water, we can salve our conscience by choosing a brand that supports clean water projects in the developing world and so feel our consumption is doing some good. A supporting article about this Liquid Gold gives some of the data and facts about the industry, and the programme looks worth watching or recording - if you miss it tonight it is being shown again overnight on Wednesday 24th at 23.20.