Something in the Water Episode 6 - Building a Water Brand in the Outback: An Australian Perspective

In this episode of "Something in the Water," host Elena Berg ventures to the Australian outback with musician Josef Salvat to explore the unique story of turning a natural mineral water source on his family’s farm into a premium water brand. The two delve into the challenges and ethics of bottling natural water, the complexities of water rights, and sustainability in an Australian context. The two also discuss the symbolic nature of water and its role in an epicurean landscape. 

Episode Guest: Josef Salvat

Follow Josef Salvat on Instagram. 

Listen to Josef Salvat’s Music

More information about the episode and Something in the Water here.

Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media website

Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia

Hosted by Elena Berg

Written and produced by Elena Berg and Clark Marchese

Audio Editing by Clark Marchese

Cover art by Sarah Glavan

Theme Music by Josef Salvat

Transcript:
[00:00:22.150] - Elena Berg

Hello, everyone. It's Elena Berg, your host of something in the Water, the podcast where we dive into the world of water, from luxury mineral springs to the challenges of access, environment and industry, for a deeper understanding of what we drink. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate all of you who have come back to our 6th episode. I hope you're enjoying the show so far and that you stick with us until the end. We're halfway through and we've only got two more small water farmers to talk to today. We're continuing on our arc of case studies around the world, this time to the land of koalas, guacas, wallabies, and wombats. We're on our way to the outback. Just a quick fun fact about kangaroos and water. Christopher J. Wearden from university College London shares through his research on kangaroos stomachs that they can go several days, even weeks, without drinking water because they eat mostly plants and digest things really slowly, so they can actually pull water from their stomach pouch over long periods of time. But we are not kangaroos. So I hope you're all staying hydrated today. And if you've listened to enough of the show, maybe starting to think a little bit more about where your hydration comes from and enjoying the process.

[00:01:39.750] - Elena Berg

Okay, now down to brass tax. Our guest for today is also not a kangaroo. He's a human person. And in addition to having a connection to a natural mineral water source in the australian outback, he's also my good friend, Josef Salvat. Josef is a musician, a singer. Maybe you've heard of his acoustic cover of diamonds by Rihanna? If you haven't, definitely check it out. But in addition to being a singer, this multifaceted human person is deep in the world of water, too. And for the last several years, he's been working to develop water from a source on his mother's farm and build it into a premium brand. Josef and I met in LA in 2022 at the Fine Water Society's taste and Design Awards. That year. I was a judge, and he was in the early stages then of developing his mineral water brand. We immediately clicked and have been good friends ever since. Incidentally, we're both living here in Paris. So even though we're talking about Australia in this episode, this was the first interview of the pod that I was actually able to do in person. So in this interview, we talked about his mother's farm and cows, the history of profiting off of water, and the challenges that come with it today.

[00:02:56.560] - Elena Berg

Sustainability in an Australian context. And again, the greater experiences that water has to offer. So let's get to it.

[00:03:22.600] - Josef Salvat

Okay, the red light is on.

[00:03:24.430] - Elena Berg

The red light is on. We're recording. All right. Well, for this episode, I'm here with my friend and colleague in water, Josef Salvat, who has a wonderful story to connect us to his world of water, which he, like me, kind of stumbled into, maybe without knowing he was going to be thinking about water this much in his life. So I want to welcome you and maybe give you a chance to introduce yourself.

[00:03:51.120] - Josef Salvat

Well, hello. My name is Josef. Thanks for having me. I am australian. I'm a singer and a musician, which you know, and that's what I've done with my life for the last twelve years. And my mother has a property over there in Australia with pretty amazing mineral water in the garden that she's been trying to do something with for about five or six years. And then last year, I saw mom struggling with it because it's a tricky thing to do. Water and a water brand.

[00:04:18.670] - Elena Berg

Well, certainly from scratch, right? You realize, oh, I have some water in my garden now.

[00:04:24.130] - Josef Salvat

What?

[00:04:24.640] - Elena Berg

How do you turn that into a brand?

[00:04:27.900] - Josef Salvat

I think also for a long time, they're like, do you even want to? She discovered that about 20 years ago. She knew there was water at the property. She didn't know how good the water was, but she originally got it tested 20 years ago. And then, yeah, about six, seven years ago, sort of thought, well, hang on, I'm going to do something with this because it's too good. And I think she wanted to stop killing animals and start like, okay, wait, let's back up.

[00:04:48.470] - Elena Berg

This is a working ranch.

[00:04:49.470] - Josef Salvat

It's a working farm. It's a working farm. It's a business, essentially. She's a farmer. Sheep, cows. It's not really big enough to make good money out of crops, wheat, this sort of stuff. And then there was a sporter. And so finally, I think, yeah, six years ago, she was like, okay, I want to do something with this. Also, it is exceptionally good water. The mineral profile of it was fantastic. She actually first decided to go get it tested 20 years ago because our cows got into the water. That water serves the house. And then the stock had a separate source, the dam in the padock. And our cows discovered this water, and their behavior completely changed. They started, like, leaping around and just like, what's going on? Oh, they're broken into that paddock. Oh, they're drinking the water. Just like, what's up with the water? It's something in the water. And then chickens as well. She reckons the chickens would, like, drink it and meditate. She's got all these wild ideas.

[00:05:34.330] - Elena Berg

Okay, well, that's maybe a good starting point, is this notion that it wasn't just, okay, are we going to do the cows? Are we going to do the horticulture? But there's something about this water that struck your mom as special, as different, as exceptional.

[00:05:51.640] - Josef Salvat

Mom has a, I would almost say on the verge of mystical belief in the water. For her, it's about bringing that to other people. The reason why I got involved is because I was like, well, they've got to make money out in property. And I wanted to help them in that respect. But for her, it's just about sharing it. And she gets like, people come to the property and just like, try the water. So it's a big thing. She has a ceremony about the water, and then she loves telling the stories about people's reactions to the water as well. And people do react to the water.

[00:06:22.160] - Elena Berg

Yeah. I already knew. I wanted to talk about this with you because that has been a theme with other people I've talked to about the sources is in many cases, people who didn't have some deep rooted love of different types of water growing up, but that they met a water that changed their lives. There seems to be a moment for many people where they discover that this is a thing. Like, you can get excited about this, maybe you can actually make some money off of too, right? Like that. It can actually also be a business.

[00:06:51.190] - Josef Salvat

It's a funny one. You can make money out of water. I don't know how much money you can make out of water.

[00:06:55.500] - Elena Berg

Yeah. I'm not sure. If you were to look at the possible profits from different sorts of businesses, I think mineral water is not maybe the first place that you would.

[00:07:07.490] - Josef Salvat

The margins are very low. Yeah, the margins are very low. Yes. I mean, you can make money out of mean. I think the richest man in China made his fortune out of water. Actually. He's a water baron. I think when it comes to a natural mineral water globally, there are so many regulations, and then if you have ethics about it, conscious about it, you want to do it well and you want to do it sustainably, it starts to eat into your margins a little bit.

[00:07:32.540] - Elena Berg

So he's talking about Zhang Shenshan. He's the founder of a company in China called Nonfu Spring, and as of 2023, he is the richest man in China. Nongfu Spring is the number one producer of bottled water in China, but they're also number three for bottled teas. And juice. So it's not just water. However, control over water has been tied to great wealth in many contexts. Even if you think about the last time you played monopoly, the card for public works is a spigot. We'll have that debate about public versus private ownership of drinking water infrastructures in a couple of episodes. But these companies, especially those who produce water, amass their wealth by either buying out companies like those owned by the people we've talked to on this series, or by bottling the water from their sources under a big company's brand. In fact, the term robber baron was coined to describe american capitalists in the 19th century. Think Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan. Anyways, one of their strategies was to gain control, horizontal control, over natural resources or public goods, namely oil, steel, electricity, and, yes, water. So thank you for coming on this tangent with me.

[00:08:48.700] - Josef Salvat

Yeah, and that's like, it's different in all countries. So, I mean, for example, in Spain, they have, like, a national water authority, right? And you have to get permission from them in order to use the water that's on your property. Just because you have a boar on your property doesn't mean it's necessarily legal. Whereas in Australia, if you have a property and you have a boar on that property or a well that taps into an aquifer, you have a right to use that water. But what they've also done is they've got a system of water rights, but they're basically like stocks, shares. You can live in an apartment in Sydney and own liters of water rights around New South Wales that you lease to farmers. It's not a very nice system, actually, because they're like, they can raise in value. Right. It can become very expensive. But if you want to run any kind of property in Australia, whether you've got a big property to feed and you need to water animals, if you've got big, big crops, you need water rights.

[00:09:37.640] - Elena Berg

Yeah, that doesn't sound like the nicest system.

[00:09:39.890] - Elena Berg

I think.

[00:09:40.980] - Elena Berg

In fact, I know that water rights have been contentious all over the world.

[00:09:45.730] - Elena Berg

This comes back to the symbolic nature of bottled water. So this is one of the things I've been trying to unpack with this whole series, is why bottled water becomes this trigger. Why is it that bottled water makes people feel so angry or wronged or like, there's no way you can care about the planet and also engage drinking, selling, packaging bottled water. And I think it's tough. It's because of this notion of this should be this free resource, even when it's not a resource. That's ever really been free that isn't necessarily priced in an appropriate way, isn't necessarily accessed.

[00:10:25.170] - Josef Salvat

It's never actually been free. I think that's really interesting. They had to build public drinking water systems. A lot of money has been invested. So we have water coming into our homes. It's not. But historically, right. It wasn't like that. I think the thing about bottled water is it has been very, very poorly abused and exploited. And it's got really, really bad press and it has been dealt with really, really badly. I mean, you've got companies that are using a huge amount of single use plastic to take something that is actually a free resource and just take it and put in a bottle and charge you for it. It is the very, very worst.

[00:11:01.200] - Elena Berg

Yeah, I guess that comes with the bigger companies that sometimes do buy up water rights and take it away from local communities, which can lead to downstream damage of watersheds and all kinds of stuff like that. So that's all true. So there's notions. Also know social justice. Who has access to clean water? I mean, you don't have to look farther than Flint, Michigan to see where race and economic background can play into who has access to safe water. So, yeah, you have this infrastructure that we've built because now we have populations that require infrastructure, but then you have massive inequality in terms of who has access to those resources. So you can start to see why it triggers this reaction. Even if you're a company that is offering a single source water that would not be used otherwise, that will refill itself if you don't take more than a certain amount of it, which you do research to find out, like what the maximum.

[00:12:01.270] - Josef Salvat

That was super important to know how.

[00:12:04.990] - Elena Berg

Much water you can take per day of the aquifer.

[00:12:07.190] - Josef Salvat

Yeah.

[00:12:07.950] - Elena Berg

So even if what you're doing isn't going to impact water issues elsewhere, it still is a symbolic product.

[00:12:14.930] - Elena Berg

And we can see how that symbolism is linked to criticism for both packaging choices and water usage, when in reality.

[00:12:23.310] - Elena Berg

Plastic packaging developed in the, what, mid 20th century and kind of exploded. It's not bottled water that's the culprit. It's the whole industry, the packaging industry. And bottled water becomes the symbol of where that went wrong.

[00:12:38.420] - Josef Salvat

I think that's really, really interesting because I was like, we'll buy lettuce in a bag. Happy to buy lettuce in a bag. You can literally stick a pot anywhere that's got some sun and grow your own little thing of lettuce, but you have to go and buy the seeds. You have to buy the pots, you have to buy the soil and all this kind of stuff. If I told my friends, oh, yeah, well, we've got x number of acres, and we need this much water to water our crops, they'd be like, oh, yeah, cool. I say, I'm going to put this incredible water I've got into a bottle and sell it to you. They're like, outrageous. Where are your ethics? Don't you have a sense of moral responsibility? There's lots of golf courses in Sydney. It's amazing. And we love our golf courses. Much water it takes to keep a golf course green a year. I mean, people walk past these things all the day, like every day, but then you give them a glass bottle of water you've made, and they're like, you're just a terrible person.

[00:13:33.050] - Elena Berg

I know.

[00:13:33.760] - Josef Salvat

Now the amount of water rights like a wheat farm up the road would have, and the amount of water that they would go through is ten times as much. This is when I started feeling a bit more comfortable about, all right, selling water. The scales of water used in agriculture are huge.

[00:13:50.110] - Elena Berg

Exactly.

[00:13:50.790] - Josef Salvat

Much, much higher than selling the water in a glass bottle. Even when you factor in the making of that glass bottle, you can imagine it would be frustrating.

[00:13:59.580] - Elena Berg

Oh, my God.

[00:14:00.250] - Josef Salvat

Because it's so much to.

[00:14:01.510] - Elena Berg

Yeah. You're like, you're already struggling just to build a business, and now all of a sudden, environmentalists are saying, oh, you can't be doing this, or you're not doing the right thing.

[00:14:09.210] - Josef Salvat

Also, there's so many other places to, if you're really concerned.

[00:14:12.820] - Elena Berg

But symbolism, when they symbolize whole categories of things, they become meeting grounds.

[00:14:20.910] - Josef Salvat

Yeah.

[00:14:21.100] - Elena Berg

I guess my point is, I think we need to embrace that and accept that and use that as a tool for talking more about environmental issues. Even if this product that you're bottling isn't a culprit. Right. Like, if you can explain that and people understand that, still engaging with why it is. This is an issue.

[00:14:38.110] - Josef Salvat

I'm making something. I'm putting something new out there, right? I'm using a glass bottle. I'm taking water out of the ground. It is. It always is. Every single thing we consume is a culprit.

[00:14:47.820] - Elena Berg

Exactly. But water becomes this somehow elevated to a space where we shouldn't be doing anything with it. Every other industry is already doing. But I think people want easy solutions, and so if they, in their mind, say, I won't drink bottled water, they've checked a box, and that means they don't have to engage. And so I think it's a space also to say you're not allowed to check that box and say that you're actually living in a sustainable fashion. Look at all the other products you're consuming. Look at all the other ways in which you're engaging with our corporate cultures. So you have an opportunity to then have an audience and figure out, okay, well, what does sustainability even mean to you? What does it mean to any of us? What do we all collectively need to do? And this is true that the solutions you're going to find in India are not going to be the same that you're going to find in Australia that are not going to be the same as the US or Europe.

[00:15:44.080] - Josef Salvat

And I mean, so let's throw Australia in there. Big, big country, huge distances. Shipping, expensive. Everything is expensive. You want to build a factory, a bottling plant at your source. It's a minimum million dollars.

[00:15:57.400] - Elena Berg

Okay? So you either already have to be independently wealthy or have people who are really willing to foot a big bill before they even see any, before you've.

[00:16:04.930] - Josef Salvat

Even shown that your product is going to work in the market.

[00:16:07.290] - Elena Berg

And that's kind of where you are now. You're in the weeds trying to figure out how to even make this viable.

[00:16:12.070] - Josef Salvat

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I have a lot of issues with the definition, the european definition of what a natural mineral water is specifically bottled at source. I think bottled source is meant to support it not being changed or messed with. It works in Europe because the distances are smaller. There's a lot more sources. A lot of the machinery is made in Europe. It doesn't cost so much money to get it to port in a country like Australia. It's very big. The distances are huge. We don't make any of the machinery there anymore because we just haven't had the population to sustain it. So it comes from either China or it comes from Europe. It's incredibly costly to build your own bottling factory at source. It's an incredibly costly to transport that I told you that we were going to bottle in aluminum, but because it was the lightest that we could use, which was going to cut down on the number of trips, we had to.

[00:16:58.640] - Elena Berg

Do well on overall transportation costs and footprint.

[00:17:01.490] - Josef Salvat

The costs were. Yeah, overall. Thank you, transportation costs and footprint. But aluminum only works if it's recycled aluminum.

[00:17:08.340] - Elena Berg

Well, in other words, it's extremely environmentally costly if you're using virgin aluminum.

[00:17:12.950] - Josef Salvat

If it's a virgin, if you're mining it and turning it into your cans, it's worse than plastic. It's far worse than plastic.

[00:17:21.280] - Elena Berg

And so yes, aluminum can be recycled and doesn't really break down in super toxic ways like plastic does. But there are a lot of emission costs to extracting metals and also a lot of social costs. Oftentimes these mines are operated in places that pay exploitative wages, place employees at greater health risks, and even rely on child labor. So if we're going to use aluminum, the best option by far is to use the stuff that's already been unearthed and recycled. That said, this recycled product is not always available, and it's also typically more costly.

[00:17:57.340] - Josef Salvat

Buying aluminum cans, buying glass bottles, buying plastic bottles in Australia is very expensive. This comes back to question of margins to justify the price. The water would justify the price on its own in an ideal world, but also it doesn't. So you want to have an experience when you're drinking a natural mineral water. This is why the majority of Australia drinks water out of a tap, except for when they go to a restaurant, and then they will drink San Pellegrino.

[00:18:19.600] - Elena Berg

Well, I think you're bringing up this whole notion of experiences, which is probably true of all of the food and drink we enjoy. But I think is a point of emphasis for mineral water, because often when people aren't thinking about the differences between the waters or that water is not just water, they might not place water next to a wine or next to some beautiful food. And so we have to kind of remind people that water can also be.

[00:18:44.160] - Elena Berg

This experience in your context to build a viable business while also taking the environment into consideration. The best way forward is to brand the product as more than just two hydrogens and an oxygen, or as something that you pick up because you're thirsty and you left your reusable bottle at home. It's something you buy to enjoy in a really thoughtful manner. There is an environmental cost to extracting that water. So it's best to focus on all the ways that water is truly special and unique. So you and I, with our connection to the fine water society, have spent some time learning about the ways that water has a place at the dinner table right in our sort of fine dining experience, when you start to experiment.

[00:19:25.880] - Elena Berg

And then you realize, like, oh, wow, this really high minerality, salty, carbonated water has a really different effect on my palate when I pair it with this particular.

[00:19:39.030] - Josef Salvat

Absolutely kill the flavor of like a light vegetable mousse at the beginning of your meal, but it will be fantastic with a steak at the end.

[00:19:45.760] - Elena Berg

But even the process of trying the stuff that probably won't work was part of the fun around water.

[00:19:53.060] - Josef Salvat

Well, I think a lot of people experience water as just, like, primary for hydration. Right. Mineral water isn't really about hydration. And even when you look at sources of mineral water that have existed, famous where they built hotels. And this kind of. It's not about health.

[00:20:09.000] - Elena Berg

It was about going to a destination.

[00:20:11.500] - Josef Salvat

It's curative. There's other things that have been going.

[00:20:15.200] - Elena Berg

On, and in Europe that might have been because in cities, the water wasn't very clean, and there wasn't a link yet between water and disease that people understood. And so all they knew is that when they went to this spa and they felt better, so it became. Sometimes it was that reinforcement.

[00:20:32.180] - Josef Salvat

But even, I mean, where our source is in Australia. So it's in the garden of this historic homestead. That's a beautiful house. Standstone house. It's about now about 200 years old. The house was built because there was a source there. The source has been a place of interest for as long as there has been human occupation.

[00:20:52.910] - Elena Berg

What an interesting notion.

[00:20:54.380] - Josef Salvat

Thousand years, right?

[00:20:55.640] - Elena Berg

So that actually the water has been at the center of it this whole time.

[00:20:59.050] - Elena Berg

Putting water at the center or pointing out how it's already there is exactly what we're trying to do here. I think that's as good a note as any to start to wrap this up. I want to thank you, my friend, for your time. I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor, and I would love to come see your mother's farm in person one day. I'll be following your journey closely.

[00:21:19.940] - Josef Salvat

Thank you so much for having me.

[00:21:21.220] - Elena Berg

Yeah, thank you very much.

[00:21:22.470] - Josef Salvat

Thanks.

[00:21:26.480] - Elena Berg

All right, it's just me now, everybody. It's been a few months since my interview with Josef, and we've had many conversations since the one that we recorded here. For now, he has put his mineral water project on hold, in part for all the reasons that we discussed in the interview. The difficulty of transporting and bottling a single source water in Australia and the cost of packaging it. And we've also been revisiting this notion of environmental cost and whether we should, in fact, be leaving more of these waters in the ground and not extracting them. This is obviously something that I'll be following very closely. And now you get to listen to Josef's music play over the credits. Thank you for listening to this episode of something in the water. Don't forget to check the show notes for information and links about this episode's guest. Please join us back here, wherever you're listening to this in one week's time. For our next episode, where we're going to finish up our arc of our case studies before hitting some of the major themes and debates around drinking water. This time, we'll head from Australia to Austria and talk all about the abundance of access to groundwater and how that affects the country landscape, why water education is important, even if you have a lot of it, and some research that shows how access to water impacts our economic and psychological well being.

[00:23:06.860] - Elena Berg

See you in Austria, and don't get lost on the way. I am your host, Elena Berg. This podcast was produced and written by myself and Clark Marchese. This is a pine forest media production and full transcripts can be found@pineforestpods.com. The music you're listening to was produced by Josef Salvat, my friend, and this week's guest cover art was made by Sarah Glavin and the show was edited by Clark Marchesi. Finally, thank you to the American University of Paris for making this podcast possible. If you feel called, writing a review and giving us a five star rating is the best thing you can do to help us out so we can make more sciency podcasts in the future.