An Introduction to Functional Water Beverages

An Introduction to
Functional Water Beverages

Whereas conventional water beverages attempt to make no substantial changes to the source water other than perhaps removing unwanted chemicals, minerals, biological contaminants, odors or tastes through selected water purification processes, Functional Bottled Water Beverages are quite different.

For at least two thousand years, water has been considered as the major facilitator of the development and sustenance of life on earth. Long regarded as the universal solvent, its molecular properties are unique and profound, yet water itself is rarely regarded as anything more than a benign, albeit necessary, adjunct to biological systems and human health.

For years water treatment specialists and a wide array of chemists and biologists have argued over what type of water was "cleanest" or "purest" for human and animal consumption as well as best for plant life.

These arguments are based on how much and what types of contaminants were being removed. What percentage of the dissolved solids were being removed? How about heavy metals? Were bacteria and other microbes being removed---and to what extent?

In other words, the issue in the past was one of water "PURITY" where the arguments, comparisons and controversies were all based on quantitative water quality measurements which could be resolved by a variety of laboratory test equipment which measured dissolved solids, bacteria content or volatile gasses from organic chemicals.

In Conventional Bottled Water Beverages, these attributes of purity and cleanliness are the very criteria that dominate the choice of source or process for a small format bottling operation.

However, recent developments and observations in both the scientific and industrial communities have attracted researchers and biotech firms to water PHYSICS and "functional" water beverages which possess very novel "altered" or "structured" water characteristics.

We address this business area of small format bottling because this is the direction in which we expect smart bottlers will proceed and where significant profits may be attainable because of the niche markets and specialty applications for the various types of successfully produced functional bottled water beverages.

One of the major categories of functional water-based beverages is the nutraceutical market where various types of fruit or herbal concentrates are added to water for nutrient value. At the present time, we will bypass this specific topic and concentrate instead on identifying a special portion of the functional water beverage market.

Creating "Functional", "Altered" or "Structured" Waters

Although this section may not provide a complete and thorough description of each of these "functional", "altered" or "structured" water technologies, it will provide enough information to begin understanding the basics of this rapidly evolving business area and identify which of the evolving Functional Water Beverage business areas may be good prospects for small format bottlers.

This area we refer to as "functional", "structured" or "altered" water beverages ironically remains an "unstructured" science with a wide variety of scientists, pseudo-scientists, wannabe scientists as well as various technology groups with their individual areas of research.

A definition of "altered", "functional", or "structured" water beverages might be as follows

"...any mechanical, electrical, optical or other process or combinations thereof which alters the physical or chemical characteristics of water, thereby creating a new form or species of water which when utilized by plants, animals or humans demonstrates measurable and repeatable benefits to chemical, enzymatic and general cellular functions".

Various technologists and scientists use terminology such as "clustered", "micro-clustered", "nano-clustered", "nano-clustered resonant water", "catalytically altered", "electrolyzed", "oxygenated" and other terms to describe the specific type or species of water which they are developing or producing and which they generally refer to as "functional", "altered" or "structured" water beverages.