Stuart McLaughlin runs Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver, Kicking Horse Mountain Resort near Golden, B.C. and several real estate developments in Ontario and Texas. In May 2005 he added Whistler Water and Polaris to the portfolio as a sideline. Della McLaughlin, his wife and co-owner, was the marketing manager for Evian for 11 years. Water is now pulling in $10 million a year in revenues, says McLaughlin.
That kind of explosive growth proves one thing: Cold water is hot. Sales of bottled water in Canada are seeing double digit growth and are not going away any time soon. According to ACNielsen MarketTrack, sales of “flat water” increased in volume by 32% in 2006 over 2005. David Hyndman, executive analyst at ACNielsen says “Growth of flat water has been consistently high for the past three years so the trend is not new.” (Hyndman adds sales of flavoured or “enhanced” water doubled in the last year, accounting for more than 40% of total growth.)
The McLaughlins’ water already ships across the continent and to a number of countries including Japan. Most of the energy has gone into revamping the facility and upgrading quality standards for the international market. As well as their own brand products, the McLaughlins also produce private labels for the domestic and overseas markets and run a soda co-packing business.
It doesn’t hurt that the Vancouver/Whistler Olympics are around the corner. “The profile will be higher and that will make our ability to take the brand into non-domestic markets so much easier,” says Stuart McLaughlin.
Next step is marketing and McLaughlin says he hopes to rebrand the water by next summer using its agency, Hyphen of Vancouver.
The company got an unexpected boost when production ramped up to around 250,000 litres a day from about 30,000 during Vancouver’s recent water crisis. “I think there is going to be a residual carry over and that our responsiveness is going to win us over a number of clients that we didn’t have regular dealings with,” he says.
Gary Hemphill, VP at Beverage Marketing Corporation in New York says: “The category is so well positioned, it has virtually no negatives associated with it and we think the growth is going to be healthy for quite a number of years to come.”
Hemphill says propelling the growth is the fact that water is seen as a healthy alternative to other beverages, as well as aggressive pricing and the introduction of multi-packs that are carried in most grocery stores.
He also expects to see more marketing of the category in the future. “A lot of the growth has been driven by getting the product into the right package and into the right outlets, at the right price,” he says. “It’s a category that’s really developed without a lot of marketing dollars put behind it; really driven by pure consumer demand.”
Evian might be the exception to that rule so far. For the third and now final year, Evian Canada has released a limited edition bottle. Michael Thouin, the Toronto-based brand manager, says 80,000 of the mountain-shaped bottles hit upmarket retailers Dec. 1. “We wanted to bring in people’s mind where Evian comes from,” he says.
Evian’s core demographic is a 25- to 39- year-old, “cosmopolitan individual wanting to live a healthier lifestyle,” says Thouin. And water, he says, is the new wine.
