Premium Waters

Premium Waters was incorporated in 1994 as the return of Chesterman Company — a beverage bottler whose lineage in the American bottling trade runs to the nineteenth century — to the bottled-water category, beginning with the acquisition of Kandiyohi Bottled Water Company in Willmar, Minnesota and the adoption of the Premium Waters name. Over the three decades since, the firm has assembled a national bottling footprint and a portfolio of some of the older continuously operated American water brands: Chippewa Springs, whose source in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin was documented by a French explorer in 1700 and shipped by rail across the country in the 1880s under a Wisconsin governor’s endorsement; Kandiyohi, distilled in Minnesota since 1985; and half a dozen other regional spring, purified, and functional-water labels.

The firm operates as an American bottled-water manufacturer and distributor across three principal categories: single-serve retail bottled water in a range of pack sizes; five-gallon home-and-office water-delivery service across the firm’s regional service territories; and specialty water products including Water Joe (caffeinated bottled water) and other functional-water labels aimed at specific consumption occasions. The corporate portfolio holds several regional brands that would each be a stand-alone regional firm elsewhere: Chippewa Springs (Wisconsin), Kandiyohi (Minnesota), Nicolet (Wisconsin), Glacier Clear (Minnesota), Nature’s Crystal, and the Mountain Valley Spring Water distribution partnership in the upper Midwest.

What distinguishes Premium Waters in the American bottled-water category is the depth of the brand-heritage layer sitting under a single corporate operator. Most American water manufacturers of the firm’s scale operate one national brand and a house-label programme; Premium Waters holds a stable of regional brands whose provenance runs from the 1700 discovery of the Chippewa spring through the 1985 founding of Kandiyohi, and uses that heritage layer to sit differently on the American grocery shelf and inside American office and home-delivery accounts than the two or three national brands the Chesterman family had been competing with for a century when it re-entered the category in 1994.