The world’s best hotels and restaurants are changing the way they serve water

You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino at Singapore’s three-Michelin-starred Zen restaurant.

But you won’t get one.

The restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, serves only water from the Swedish company Nordaq, said chef Martin Ofner.

The restaurant’s food and drinks are also made with water, from water supplies to juices in soft drinks, he said.

Zen is one of more than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants serving Nordaq water, said CEO Johanna Mattsson CNBC Travel. The water, which is treated and bottled on site using local tap water, is also present in more than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she said.

The company aims to reduce the number of single-use water bottles in the hospitality industry, both the cheap plastic ones commonly found in hotel rooms and the European mineral water in glass bottles served in high-end restaurants. The latter can travel thousands of miles from its source to where it is ultimately consumed.

“Transporting water over water doesn’t make sense,” Matson said. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”

Nordaq bottles don’t have plastic labels, so they can be easily washed and reused, and they come with wide necks so they can be washed in regular dishwashers, she said.

After filling, the bottles are also securely capped and date-stamped, Mattson said.

Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had a Nordaq water system since 2023, with bottles available in hotel rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.

Hotel manager Cindy Kong allowed CNBC Travel to visit its bottling plant to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the facility can produce 500 bottles of purified water per hour.

“Usually we process 1,000 to 2,000 (bottles) every day,” she said.

Nordaq is one of many companies in the premium sustainable water business. Castalie water is present in more than 700 hotels in France, according to information on its website, while Purezza water is served in more than 5,000 locations in 13 countries, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.

Indian hospitality company ITC Hotels has launched its own zero-mile water brand called SunyaAqua to reduce the number of single-use plastic bottles in its 140 hotels. “Each guilt-free sip is bottled at the facility, eliminating the need for transportation,” New Delhi’s ITC Maurya wrote on Facebook in July.

Hospitality companies are the main market for Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. It operates in hotels – with a Rosewood Abu Dhabi facility opening soon – and through centralized facilities.

In the latter case, Be WTR founder and CEO Mike Hecker said the water may move a little further than the ITC hotel’s “zero mile” water, but not by much.

“We don’t want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling plant because, as you well know, the carbon footprint … is greatly affected by transportation,” he told CNBC. “We try to be at the point of consumption as much as we can.”

The company’s main operations are in the United Arab Emirates, but the water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansions into Canada and China, Hecker said. The company closed a $44 million Series C funding round in October.

Be WTR has signed a global agreement with Accor to become the preferred partner for the French hotel company’s luxury hotel brands.

“We are the first company to enter into a global water agreement targeting five-star (Accor) brands such as Raffles, Pullman (and) Sofitel,” he said.

Companies that supply the tourism and food industries with no-transport or low-transport filtered water say they eliminate millions of plastic bottles from use each year. But they have another advantage – they can generate income for their clients as well.

Be WTR’s Hecker said its first bottling plant at the Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi saved “over a million imported bottles a year. And this is a significant achievement both in … carbon dioxide emissions and in creating a positive profit for our client.”

Hecker declined to say how much a bottle of Be WTR sells for, but said it is “competitively priced” with glass mineral water imported from Europe.

Nordaq’s Mattsson says each bottle of water costs between 11 and 21 cents to produce. But water is sold much more expensive. Providore Singapore sells Nordaq still and sparkling water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge four times that price for a single bottle.

Purezza estimates that each bottle costs about 30 cents to produce, about one-fifth the price of regular bottled water, the company said sales brochure. But both can be sold at the same price, according to the brochure, which says 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold at $5 a bottle could generate $13,200 in annual profit for the retailer.