NEW YORK:Tap water is fine for Alice Waters, who stopped selling bottled stuff last year at her environmentally conscious Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. That could be bad news for Nestle SA. Per-capita sales of the product in the US will rise 6.3 per cent this year and 3.6 per cent in 2010, slowing from 8.9 per cent last year, according to Euromonitor International Ltd.
Operating profit growth at Nestle's water unit, whose 2006 sales of 9.6 billion Swiss francs ($8.7 billion) were 10 per cent of the Swiss company's total, will shrink by half to 5 per cent in 2008, UBS AG has forecast.
Beverage companies including Nestle, Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. are also facing inroads from private labels in the $15 billion industry. The competition comes as religious groups and environmentalists say that bottling wastes energy and overtaxes landfills.
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