The bottled water industry in Europe, XIX-XXth centuries

Abstract

From a historical point of view, the bottled water industry has gone from being an appendage of the spa business to become one of the most important activities of the food industry in Europe. This paper has two basic aims. First, it seeks to identify the different stages of the business history of bottled water and the configuration of the large corporations that dominate today’s market. To this end, new statistical information is provided on the production and consumption of bottled water from a long-term perspective, and the business histories of the leading bottled water brands in France, Italy and Germany, the major market leaders, are reconstructed. Second, it analyses the bottled water sector in Spain, a country that in recent decades has managed to move up in the European rankings in spectacular way, both in terms of production and per capita consumption.