Wonder Waters: Fortified and Flavored Waters

People today don’t drink — they hydrate. At least that’s what the trend-makers tell us. Drinking is to hydrating, they say, as talking is to dialoguing: the former a passive reaction, the latter a conscious action taken in a “proactive, holistic” spirit.

If that sounds like a suspicious deployment of jargon, its subtext doesn’t: Our parents may have headed to a drinking fountain after feeling parched, but we know better than to wait for thirst before we hydrate. Health-care professionals and trade organizations have made sure of that, schooling us in the doctrine that we need at least eight 8-oz. servings of water per day, whether we’re thirsty or not.

While a study published last year in the American Journal of Physiology called into question that 64-oz. minimum, consumers regard hydration as a legitimate part of preventive health care. So, the bottle of water has joined yoga and the Atkins diet as some of the most popular weapons in America’s feel-good arsenal, and the beverage industry has taken note.

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, New York, Americans spent $7.7 billion on bottled waters in 2002 — 10% more than they spent the previous year. That works out to a little more than 21 gallons per American, a per-capita consumption that tripled during the 1990s. In fact, this year bottled water may slip into the No. 2 slot among commercial beverages, and, per a Beverage Marketing Corporation statement, “If current trends continue, with bottled water growing strong and carbonated soft drinks moving slowly, bottled water could overtake soft drinks by the end of the next decade.”

Bottling a mineral spring and slapping it with a pretty label won’t keep a company afloat in today’s overcrowded bottled-water pool. While Catherine Hogan, North America regional category marketing manager, beverages, International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF), New York, doesn’t think that consumers have necessarily grown tired of bottled waters, she notes that “when competition began to heat up a few years ago with the entry of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other large beverage manufacturers, and with more brands for consumers to choose from, it began to drive down prices and made bottled water more of a commodity purchase.”

Joe Minella, manager, beverage applications, Virginia Dare Extract Co., Brooklyn, NY, agrees: “There’s a lot of competition out there, and you have to set yourself apart if you want your piece of the market.” How does something as basic as water set itself apart, other than by sporting a more eye-catching bottle? By taking the vitamins, minerals and nutraceuticals that consumers look for in sports beverages and gracing them with water’s healthy halo. Lace this cocktail with a refreshing flavor and there’s the key to the fastest-growing segment of the bottled-water market.

“Enhanced waters,” “functional waters,” “vitamin waters,” or “smart waters”: Whatever the name, these value-added drinks represented $245 million in wholesale purchases last year, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation. That’s an impressive leap from the $20 million they earned in 2000, and a powerful incentive to enter the enhanced water game. PepsiCo Inc., Purchase, NY, has already introduced four flavors of its fortified Aquafina Essentials, and Coca-Cola, Atlanta, offers a similar lineup sold under the Dasani NutriWaters brand. Propel, the entry of PepsiCo-owned Gatorade, leads the market and, according to the International Flavors & Fragrances website, was the first brand to top $100 million in annual U.S. sales in 2002.

Consumers demand more — and more-healthful — beverage choices, explains Hogan. “The promise of vitamins, minerals and other functional ingredients in a bottled water provides the consumer with a convenient solution to meeting a specific need, whether it is the desire for calcium for healthy bones or guarana for energy,” she says.

Not only is bottled water a user-friendly medium for fortification, but, says Branin Lane, M.S., R.D., nutraceutical application scientist, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Decatur, IL, “it’s seen to be inherently healthful, so it’s not a disconnect for anyone to add these ingredients to it.”

As such, consumers can feel good about fortified waters. “We’re on a health and wellness craze in this country to begin with,” notes Phil Katz, president, Shuster Laboratories, Inc., Canton, MA. “Some people just feel better gulping down a bottle of water with some B-complex vitamins at 10% to 25% of the RDI than getting 100% of the recommended allowance by popping a multivitamin.”

And speaking nutritionally, consumers are wise to hydrate with enhanced water in lieu of soft drinks. “I think there’s been a big trend in this country...to get away from what I call the bellywash of empty calories from carbonated soft drinks,” Katz says. With high-protein diets handing down a veritable prohibition on excess sugar calories, enhanced water’s no-calorie, no-sugar credentials guarantee it a market of dieters looking for something acceptable to drink.

The products attract the physically active, too. Maureen Draganchuk, vice president of business development at Virginia Dare, recalls reading about a beverage-company marketing director, who, a few years back, spotted an interesting pattern to gym patrons’ hydrating habits. The director “noticed that the majority of the Gatorade was consumed by males, not females. What they saw females consuming instead was water. And they wanted a piece of that market,” she says.

But the virtues of health and hydration can’t account entirely for enhanced water’s rising profile. Despite Puritanical roots, we wax hedonistic in matters of food and drink, and “enhancement” by definition touches on flavor. A poll of visitors to the website Supermarket guru.com found that 68% are “already into the trend and buying flavored waters (not vitamin- or otherwise enhanced)” because they’re “easier to drink” and “help us drink more water.” However, only 23% actually claim to like the flavor, indicating room for improvement. And if non-fortified waters could use some flavor tinkering, the ones enhanced with vitamins, minerals and botanicals would be well-nigh unpalatable without it.

Flavor, function, health, hydration: We want it all, and we want it in one easy bottle. In this respect, the enhanced-water trend is the next logical step in our relentless drive to multitask. Tom Pirko, president, BevMark LLC, a food and beverage-consulting firm in Santa Barbara, CA, sees it as a reflection of the complex American psyche. “Stepping away from beverages and nutrition and looking at some more deeply seated consumer trends, one of the reasons why this category has emerged...is because Americans have become accustomed to asking for more. They don’t want something that is simple or basic,” he says. “They expect to have added benefits delivered to them with almost everything.”

Americans want to feel those benefits well beyond the scope of the original product. “These drinks aren’t about satisfying our need to live or our need for liquid,” Pirko says. “We’re talking about issues that have to do with constellations of values, various needs, various insecurities.” Enhanced waters are aspirational vehicles — a means to achieve the American dream of self-betterment. If choosing “smart water” can make us feel, or at least appear to be, smarter, we’ll buy it. And if drinking a non-caloric solution of vitamins and minerals assuages guilt about eating that last piece of cheesecake or missing Pilates class, bottoms up.

“It’s almost like a system of belief,” Pirko says. “You’re going to put something in that water that’s going to affect your health, your attitude, your lifestyle, or whatever.” That’s a lot to ask of drink, but judging from the warm welcome consumers have given enhanced water, it must be doing something right.

But how much enhancement is too much? At what point does enhanced water start seeping into beverage territory? Government agencies, as well as the bottled water industry, have done their part to create distinct boundaries, with FDA drawing its line in Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Section 165.110. In addition to defining bottled water as “water that is intended for human consumption and that is sealed in bottles or other containers with no added ingredients except that it may optionally contain safe and suitable antimicrobial agents,” the code sets what Katz calls “very stringent rules on the quality and the source of the water.” It specifies what counts as artesian, spring, sparkling, mineral, well, purified and even plain-old drinking water, and it mandates testing both of the source and the finished water. Even any carbonation added to sparkling products must equal the level in the water as it emerged from its source.

But where do the guidelines leave the nutrients, flavors, and other “added ingredients” that give enhanced water its name? In something of a regulatory gray zone, it turns out. While the International Bottled Water Association, Alexandria, VA, points out that flavors, extracts or essences derived from spices or fruits can appear in a bottled water, they must comprise less than 1% of the final product’s weight or the product becomes a “soft drink.” And because bottled water must be calorie-free and sugar-free, “as soon as you add calories to that liquid,” Katz says, it’s a bottled water no more. Because of the liberal way in which some manufacturers interpret FDA regulations, he says, “a lot of these other products are really trying to market a product using bottled water as the major ingredient, and enhancing it with all of these other things.”

“The situation is a little misleading,” admits Minella, “because a lot of waters today are really not true waters. They’re adding sugars, they’re adding acid, they’re adding color in some. I don’t really look at them as waters; I look at them as still beverages.”

How do they get away with it? “You can still call the products ‘bottled waters,’” Katz says, “but in the name of the product, you must list all of the other things you put in there. You can have a bottled water with essence of lemon, and vitamins A, B, C, D and so on. But it’s all got to be in the name of the product.”

Draganchuk points out that the government really starts getting involved “if you trespass on ingredients that aren’t GRAS.” That includes many of the herbs, botanicals and nutraceuticals that have captured consumer interest and help define enhanced waters’ healthful image. In these cases, suppliers have the option of self-affirmation. “You’re finding a lot more ingredient suppliers who have self-affirmation of GRAS status on their material,” she says.

Healthy hypeIn any event, supermarket shelves suffer no shortage of bottled waters with generously enhanced nutritionals, flavors, and profitability. Aquafina, Dasani and Clearly Canadian Beverage Corp.’s Reebok Fitness Water all contain vitamins and minerals. Propel has vitamins and flavors, and Energy Brands’ Glaceau Vitaminwaters have vitamins, minerals, flavors, and botanicals like ginkgo, echinacea and astragalus.

This may not please FDA, but it does appeal to Americans’ growing fascination with physical, spiritual and emotional wellness. Manufacturers are grabbing — and holding — consumers by tailoring their formulas to specific markets’ health and wellness concerns. “Some use formulations that may be beneficial to men, others to women, and still others to reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease,” notes John Foley, technical services, food applications, BASF Corporation, Mount Olive, NJ. Consider a water enhanced with calcium, iron and folic acid for women of child-bearing age, or a formula rich in heart-healthy fiber and estrogen-like isoflavones for those nearing menopause.

“Antioxidants such as green tea and grapeseed extract, and energy-enhancers such as the B vitamins and guarana extract, also are key areas of interest for consumers today,” notes Tom Connelly, vice president, sales, Bio-Botanica, Hauppauge, NY. “Products fortified with herbs and nutrients such as these will reach a target audience looking for ways to improve their health without necessarily changing their food and diet habits.”

And never underestimate the power of clever marketing in establishing a product’s identity. Energy Brands has cornered the hipster set with its arch, postmodern ads. Eschewing flavor-based names, the company calls its Vitaminwater with vitamin C and echinacea “Defense,” implying the link between the two nutrients and beefed-up immunity. “Power-C” gets its purported wattage from the amino acid taurine, popular with bodybuilders, while ginseng gives off a mindful, more Zen-style “Energy.” For those hoping literally to chill out with bottled water, “Stress-B” has St. John’s Wort, which some claim soothes frayed nerves.

Take it or leave it, the catchy hype rests on a firm foundation of good science. Studies link compounds like lycopene to cardiovascular health and reduced cancer risk, and lutein may slow the progression of certain eye diseases, Foley notes. A growing body of evidence supports the health benefits of soy and fiber. And by combining compatible nutrients, such as calcium and the amino acid lysine, which boosts the former’s bioavailability, notes Herb Woolf, technical marketing manager at BASF, you can design a fortification strategy that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

Water fortification isn’t as easy as crumbling a multivitamin into a bottle. Finer points surface at every step of the process, beginning with the water itself. Katz points out, “there are ranges of pH in water. It has its own chemistry.”

That chemistry can throw a curveball into the solubility or physical stability of certain nutrients. For example, folic acid is nearly insoluble below pH 5, Foley notes. And if water from a particular source carries high concentrations of transition metals such as iron and copper, their presence “may accelerate the degradation of numerous nutrients,” he adds.

Confronted with these variables, nutrient suppliers have coaxed some fortification ingredients into behaving compliantly in bottled water. For example, Matsutani America, Decatur, IL, has partnered with ADM to produce digestion-resistant maltodextrin (“soluble dietary fiber” to those consumers scanning the Nutrition Facts panel) that’s beverage-friendly, heat- and acid-stable, tasteless, odorless, colorless, and soluble enough to “achieve more than significant levels of fiber without impacting the sensory attributes of the beverage,” says Steven Young, Matsutani America’s technical advisor. Called Fibresol-2, it’s also a potent prebiotic whose ability to “help maintain healthful levels of blood triglycerides, serum cholesterol, blood glucose, and intestinal microflora,” he says, should appeal to consumers looking for another reason to drink their way to health.

Suppliers have also tackled that old oil-and-water dilemma, which had long bedeviled attempts at supplementing aqueous beverages with vitamin E. “Because it’s a fat-soluble vitamin,” says Lane, “if you try to incorporate E into water, you wind up with droplets rising to the top of the liquid, which is called ‘ringing.’” In addition, straight vitamin E, like some botanicals, clouds the water-white clarity that consumers expect. No one wants hazy water, enhanced or not.

“But by creating something called a nanoemulsion,” Lane explains, “which has fine spheres of vitamin E encapsulated within a matrix, we allow the E not only to be dispersed throughout the solution, but to maintain its optical clarity.” This nanoemulsion gives manufacturers a natural soy- or corn-based source of E’s highly bioavailable d-alpha-tocopherol isomer that’s stable and virtually unnoticeable in water. Even at doses that deliver 100% of the RDI for vitamin E, he says, “You’re not going to have ringing, you’re not going to have sedimentation, it’s not going to affect color, and it’s not going to affect flavor.”

Technologists have used encapsulation to keep minerals and botanicals in solution, too. Woolf notes, “The bioavailability of microencapsulated carotenoids is often increased compared with the same carotenoid found naturally occurring in food. This is partly a result of the nano- and micron-sized nutrient droplets found as a result of this formulation technique.” Nevertheless, some nutrients may still require further stabilization beyond encapsulation “to reduce the oxidative degradation of a labile nutrient,” he says. “This could be done by using another antioxidant, such as vitamin C or E, or by packaging the product in an oxygen-impermeable container.” To protect susceptible nutrients from transition minerals, he recommends chelating agents or keeping waters demineralized.

Manufacturers can always compensate for inevitable degradation via overages. Overages are often recommended, Woolf says, but they depend upon several factors, including the nutrient’s inherent stability, the formulations in which it appears, subsequent processing, packaging, pH, light exposure, ingredient interactions, and the product’s intended shelf life.

Some in the nutrition community are concerned about those 25% RDI values piling up in our hyper-fortified diets. “There are concerns in general for overexposure to some vitamins, such as vitamins A, D and K, if the marketplace they are intended for has an abundance of these nutrients in the food supply,” Woolf allows. However, if manufacturers follow a prudent fortification guideline, “Fortification with these vitamins should not present nutrient safety concerns.”

Besides, as Katz points out, the 1% limit on additives makes the risk of excess very difficult to achieve in bottled waters alone. Indeed, manufacturers’ main challenge tilts more toward ensuring that you’ve added enough nutrients to support what the label says. “You’ve got to meet those label claims,” he reminds manufacturers, and that means conducting long-term shelf-life studies and subjecting the products to thorough chemical analysis.

While the superego occupies itself with nutrient levels and bioavailability, the id asks one simple question: How do enhanced waters taste? The answer could lie anywhere between the contents of a medicine cabinet and a smelter’s furnace if enhancement meant fortification alone. But thanks to flavor houses, it doesn’t.The flavoring process begins with careful consideration of the top-billed ingredient, and when it comes to flavor, “all waters are not created equally,” says Mike Bloom, president, Flavor & Fragrance Specialties (FFS), Mahwah, NJ. For one, the lighter its mineral load, the cleaner the water tastes.

“When you start working with mineral waters, you actually get a masking effect” on flavors, says Joe Dono, director of beverage technology at Virginia Dare. For that reason, he and his colleagues often handicap themselves in the lab: “We’ll buy a well-known mineral water and flavor that, because it’s loaded with minerals and salts that your flavor has to override,” he says.

The real obstacle, however, comes not from water’s natural chemistry, but from the enhancing nutrients. “A lot of these nutrients were meant to be delivered in tablet-form,” Minella says, and there’s a reason why we swallow those tablets instead of nibbling them bite by bite.

Take the sharp, metallic tang of minerals like iron and zinc, for instance. Not surprisingly, the taste isn’t easy to restrain. As Frank Tangel, director of technical applications at FFS, explains, “We just developed a nice natural lemon-lime flavor for a mineral-based water, and it took us a fair amount of effort to tailor it to provide a delicate flavor that would mask the undesirable attributes of the minerals without being overpowering itself.”

Peter Wasko, beverage manager/flavorist, David Michael & Co., Inc., Philadelphia, has had luck masking minerals with tropical flavors. “They have some of what I call sulfury notes, and they complex with the off-flavors pretty well so they can hide them,” he says. They’re also quite popular with consumers.

For its part, the botanical crop has gained notoriety for pervasive bitterness. One offender is guarana, the source of guaranine, caffeine’s botanical cousin. Like caffeine, it puts up a flavor fight, and yields only to multi-pronged attack. Bloom suggests starting with “a flavor that would make an initial impact, and then add something behind it to mask the bitterness — maybe a sweet flavor like banana, or something cooling.”

Such cooling enhancers “have worked out well at low levels, and in conjunction with the flavor matrix, to mask some of these bitter notes,” Tangel says. They also leave the mouth with a pleasant frosty sensation akin to the chill after a spoonful of ice cream. “It makes you come back for more,” he says.

As for vitamins, consensus opinion holds the B complex — especially thiamine — in particular contempt. “That flavor just comes through,” laments Minella. “And as the product ages, it comes through even more.”

How to rein it in? The common strategy is actually to embrace the offending note within the added flavor. If thiamine comes off as bitter, hide it with a flavor, like cranberry or grapefruit, that’s slightly bitter itself, but in a “good” way. The off-flavor thus “becomes part of the beverage’s flavor,” says Wasko.

Fortification and flavoring make enhanced water a dynamic medium, with some functional waters containing various components that could exacerbate or accelerate the flavor deterioration, according to Tangel. “Certain minerals catalyze specific reactions that can occur with flavors,” he notes. Iron, the archetypal oxidizer, accelerates rancidity, posing a particular threat to citrus notes, which can go from refreshing to bitter in its presence. “There are a number of specific chemical reactions that occur during oxidation, which distort the flavor and make it less pleasing,” he says, citing as an example the oxidative rearrangement of citrus terpenes.

Time’s ravages also degrade most flavors, lessening their intensity. “This allows the vitamins to ‘come out’ again, which may be objectionable,” cautions Dono. The solution, however, is not to frontload the water with flavor.

According to Wasko, manufacturers have to consider gulpability: “People want to be able to consume large volumes of water,” he explains. But as a beverage’s flavor accumulates on the palate, its value as a thirst-quencher diminishes, triggering the consumer’s satiety response. “So when flavoring water,” he says, “you want to go with something light enough so that you know the flavor is there and you recognize it, but it’s still refreshing.”

And don’t forget the micro concerns. “Water, for the most part, doesn’t have a preservative,” notes Dono, “and it’s generally not heat-processed.” Manufacturers can pass ozone through the product to make it safe. But while this knocks out the bacteria, it will also knock out the flavor, he says. Adding flavors after ozonation might seem like a good idea, but the unsterile flavors risk recontaminating the ozonated water.

“This is a major problem right now,” Dono continues, and manufacturers have approached it from different angles. “Many actually pasteurize some of the waters that are coming out on the market to prevent this. And others, like the big manufacturers, have their own special techniques for knocking out bacterial infections.” But as a general rule, flavors with less of a tendency to harbor bacteria make the best candidates for bottled waters. “If you start using fruit flavors, many of them have added essences, and you’ll sometimes get bacterial growth in these,” he says. Citrus flavors, however, because of their high phenyl coefficients, can actually inhibit growth.

There’s something fitting about the effectiveness and popularity of citrus notes in enhanced water. In effect, it takes the trend back to its roots: that glass of water floating a slice of lime or lemon for a zippy flavor boost. As Bloom says, “When you go into a restaurant, you say, ‘Gimme a club soda with lime or lemon.’ It’s almost automatic.” Now that choice really is automatic. Just open the water bottle and it’s already there: flavor, fortification and a beverage you can feel good about.

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a bachelor’s degree in consumer food science with a minor in English from the University of California-Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and enjoys cooking and eating food in addition to writing about it.

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