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from the all-the-cryptosporidium-you-can-drink dept.
At Rainbow Grocery, a cooperative in this city’s Mission District, one brand of water is so popular that it’s often out of stock. But one recent evening, there was a glittering rack of it: glass orbs containing 2.5 gallons of what is billed as “raw water” — unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water, $36.99 each and $14.99 per refill, bottled and marketed by a small company called Live Water.
“It has a vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouth feel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile,” said Kevin Freeman, a shift manager at the store. “Bottled water’s controversial. We’ve curtailed our water selection. But this is totally outside that whole realm.”
Here on the West Coast and in other pockets around the country, many people are looking to get off the water grid.
[...] Raw water is such a nascent business that there’s debate over what exactly to call the liquid. Daniel Vitalis hosts a podcast, “ReWild Yourself,” that promotes hunting for food and gathering water; he started the site called FindASpring.com to help people locate springs. He prefers the term “unprocessed water,” which echoes the idea of processed versus unprocessed food.
“I don’t like ‘raw water’ because it sort of makes people think of raw sewage,” Mr. Vitalis said. “When you say ‘live water,’ that’s going to trigger a lot of people who are into physics and biology. Is it alive?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfiltered.html
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Wednesday January 03 2018, @05:44AM (2 children)
My well is awesome -- no hydrogen sulfide at all. When I'm in town and drink the city water drawn from a local lake, it's just about undrinkable. It has a whiff of lake algea masked by chlorine. Of course, you can cure that just by running city water through one of those pitcher dealies with the charcoal filter in it, but it is very nice to just open the tap and get some ice-cold "live" water right from my well.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:03AM (1 child)
Holy cow -- as much as I like my well, and feel chagrined at not thinking up a way to turn my awesome water into $6/gal gold, there's a whole sack of nutty opportunism going on with this lot:
As a tangent, this is the funniest teardown of a juicero ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @05:00PM
It only works in a place where not many people can supply it - around here if you marketed it at one of the local: Whole Foods, Fresh Market, Earth Fare, Trader Joes, or even more esoteric "pure foods" stores, you could sell it for a while at the above price points, but it wouldn't be long before others undercut you. The shmancy crystal sphere container is a nice stab at branding, and you could make various claims about safety testing to try to mask the fact that you're selling well water, but it wouldn't be long at all before a price war started.
🌻🌻 [google.com]