Something about Water Quality
Before we started Sprudel, the first thing we had to test was the water quality out of the machine. The only way to do this was to get a machine. So we shipped a machine out from Germany, connected it to taps in 3 locations and took a water sample from each location to the Lab to get it tested.
Luckily for us the water was perfectly fine for drinking. The filter that is used in the machine eliminates not only sediment to a microscopic scale (upto 0.2 microns if you want to get technical), but they also remove 99.99% of bacteria and neutralises the taste of Chlorine.
The water quality through our machines are on par with almost all locally available water (strange huh?).
When we started out, not many of the people who we met knew that bottled water in Dubai is called 'bottled drinking water' for a reason. The reason being that it is in fact tap water. Plain and simple. The companies get tap water from the Desalinisation plant in Jebel Ali, either through a direct connection if you are lucky enough to live next door or, like the rest of the companies, they receive the water through water tankers with the words Sweet Water on the side of them. They take this water, filtrate it (hopefully), and package it in the various plastic containers that we all love (and hate).
These bottles are then transported to the various supermarkets and businesses around town where a lot of the time they are left outside in the direct sunlight (we will get into this problem in a future blog). You can never be sure how long the water has been inside the bottles. Some of them have time stamps, but there is no 100% regulation of this.
The water from our water purifiers differ because the holding time is less. The water is constantly flowing through the pipes of the network into buildings and is stagnant for less time. Even though we say water is water, there is just something about a freshly made glass of sparkling water made from our machines...but we know what you're thinking, 'of course you would say that, we want your business!'...
How we performed a blind taste test
A highlight for us early on was a taste testing session we did at an international healthcare company. We did a blind test - locally bottled water vs. international bottled water vs. filtered tap water though our machines. Both still and sparkling. We had about 10 different waters and we invited the whole office (over 100 people) to come and taste each water. At the end of the day there was no obvious winner. The filtered tap water scored as high as some international waters in both still and sparkling. Some local ones didn't score very high but that could have been due to the plastic, which came up a lot in the comments of taste. There were co-workers who trekked through the Rocky Mountains who drank mineral water direct from the source and who said they knew their water. Even they couldn't tell which was tap water. For us, it was very interesting to get feedback from so many different people from so many different walks of life. It was a fun afternoon.
The whole taste testing event was to educate people about alternatives to bottled water and the main thing what we took from it is that filtered water in Dubai is comparable to pretty much every bottled water that companies use here. Now if they could only save money whilst doing all of this........(to be continued).
