Article on Avalis Glacier Water. MORE THAN JUST WATER With an unparalleled purity, Icelandic glacier water could be just the refreshment your beverage sales have been thirsting for. Have the people of Iceland been harbouring a secret all these years? Andy Causer thinks so. As managing director of glacier water brand Avalis he’s on a mission to bring the incredible purity of the island’s glacier melt water to a global audience. “In Iceland, people have been drinking pure glacier water for at least 1,200 years,” says Andy. “The water that we harvest goes straight from glacier to glass; we don’t add alkalies like many mineral water companies do. Our water is naturally alkaline which makes it very good for you, and science show’s it’s particularly helpful for people with high cholesterol, high blood sugar, it’s more hydrating... It says a lot about the purity of our product that everything that’s in the bottle comes straight from the glacier. Nothing’s added.” A clear winner It’s a sustainable source of refreshment too; Avalis is collected from naturally-occurring melt water from the Eyjafjallajokull glacier formed 2,500 years ago in southern Iceland. Every drop is gravity fed down through prehistoric lava giving a liquid that’s unusually low in ‘total dissolved solids’, the measure of purity for spring and mineral waters. “It’s untouched,” says Andy. “We have around 40-51 mgl TDS in ours; if you were to look at a mineral water competitor they’d be in the hundreds. Unfortunately water authorities only recognise spring, tap or mineral. They don’t differentiate for glaciers, but Avalis has the original taste and flavour of the glacier because nothing’s added or taken away. We have clients who make spirits from it, and others who make perfumes, because it’s so pure. There’s not a brand that has a better quality product than ours, but pricewise we’ve pitched it as a challenger so it’s affordable.” Andy’s team also work to keep the environmental impact of the distribution of the water to a minimum. Collected in fully reusable and recyclable tanks, the water is bulk shipped (for minimal carbon footprint) to the UK for bottling into non-PET Tetrapacks or recycled glass bottles. “Even our caps are made of sugar cane,” says Andy. He’s also hoping to grow use of the glacier water; currently the company is tapping into just one per cent of the available ice melt with the other 99% running back to the sea. “The people who have been drinking the water for generations take that incredible quality for granted,” says Andy, “but when one in three people globally don’t have access to safe drinking water there seems like scope to do so much more. We have clients in China, India and South Africa where such pure water is needed, so part of our purpose as a company is sharing that brilliant resource with those markets that really need it.