Why Purified Water Should Be the Industy Standard

An observation:
Millions of the same people who conscientiously buy
bottled water to avoid tap water put ice made from the same tap water they refuse to
consume into all their favorite beverages — including the purified or filtered water in their bottled water purchases.
Numerous times we have observed customers in restaurants order bottled water rather than accepting the restaurant’s tap water, and then pour it over the
restaurant’s tap water ice!
We’ve also listened to stories about people who travel to other countries where the water can make you truly sick on a regular basis.
They know to boil water before they drink it or even cook with it, but unknowingly, they consume ice made from this same water and become ill. What happens when major purified bottled water
companies begin to open and expand markets outside the U.S. where water quality has always been an issue.
Will ice become a
consideration in these
markets as well?
Will the U.S. packaged ice industry be prepared to
carry it’s purification and freezing technologies to these markets or will we lose another expansion opportunity?

An observation on branding:
Our company also happens to serve as a wholesaler for Anheuser-Busch. The majority of the value of our business is the rights to the Anheuser-Busch brands for our assigned territory. This value is much greater than the value of our warehouse, trucks, and other physical assets.

If you remove branded consumer products from a retail store, consumers will notice and retailers risk losing customers who will go elsewhere to find their favorite brands (“Where’s my Budweiser®, my Pepsi-Cola®, my Campbell’s Soup®, my Orville Redenbacher® popcorn, my Crest® toothpaste? etc.).

In contrast, most packaged ice companies do not have any value in brand rights. For large ice companies that completely dominate their market, there is value in their retail customer base since most retailers still only use one ice company, and we presume a value for keeping that retail business. However, because there is no brand equity, even the most
dominant ice companies are
vulnerable because virtually no consumers would notice or care if their ice company was changed overnight.

An observation on current industry programs:
The current PIQSC program from the International Packaged Ice Association is helping to raise the bar for manufacturing standards in our industry. However, most consumers probably already assume that we are using good manufacturing standards. If consumers are not making a distinction between our ice and the ice from their ice tray at home, then we still haven’t done anything to raise barriers to entry for our industry. For some reason, many people in the ice industry seem to view the water quality issue as “What do we need to do to get by?” or “What is considered sanitary and acceptable?” If we stop there, we haven’t distinguished ourselves from ice made at home or from any on-premise icemaker. Many ice manufacturers who have state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment, stainless steel contact surfaces, etc., would need to invest only a relatively
modest amount to
MOVE TO IMPROVE in the direction of purification.