JEDDAH: Bottled water, in plastic containers from half to 20 liters, has become a norm for the average man on the street or the household. Its appeal continues to increase with citizens and expatriates becoming more health conscious.
“Consumers in Saudi Arabia are becoming increasingly health-conscious. The trend is pushing demand for healthier products, including bottled water,” a top executive of a major company dealing in bottled water said yesterday.
“Bottled water and low calorie cola carbonates registered an eight percent growth in total volume terms in 2007, while fruit and vegetable juice recorded a six percent growth. The tentative figures for 2008 are estimated to be higher,” Ahmed El-Mehelmy, executive director of sales and marketing at Saudi Industrial Projects Co., part of Salem A. Bugshan & Brothers, told Arab News in an interview.
There are as many bottled water dealers as one can think of. “There is no outright leader as the market is fragmented,” he said. As the demand for water grows, investment is also going up. Millions of riyals have already been invested and much more will be done in the days to come. “The current size of the Kingdom’s market for bottled water is as much as the soft drinks market,” he said, adding that they together amount to around SR600 million.
The procedure is to get desalinated water from Kindasa at the Jeddah Islamic Port area by government approved road tankers. “This water is drinkable, but we further improve its quality to make it absolutely safe by extricating all impurities and then following a Hydro 7 process that is followed in the United States, our collaborators, before it is filled in bottles of different sizes,” he said. “The process essentially follows seven steps to offer the consumers high quality water, which is backed by a distinct packaging system for the bottled water,” El-Mehelmy added.
The Bugshan family, Ahmed Salem Bugshan in particular, is one of the major investors in this business. It has made huge investments that cover distributorships, warehouse and fleet expansions, and continuous training programs for new and existing employees, he said.
However, it is estimated that hundreds of billions of riyals will have to be spent in the next decades to keep the Kingdom’s public water infrastructure in good repair, to keep up with growing demand and to upgrade water purification to deal with new pollutants. A good sign is that a substantial portion of the population is drinking bottled water and/or filtering their water.