Consumers who buy Nestlé Waters’ products trust that our waters are safe and taste good. We work hard to maintain that trust, using a quality and safety process that begins with source selection and continues through bottling.

Because our products are both safe and portable, they are ideal for assisting communities facing interrupted water supplies. We donate our products during natural disasters and times of need to families and communities across North America.

This section details our:
• Process for ensuring water safety and quality
• Actions taken to meet or exceed regulatory standards
• Approach to monitoring safety concerns
• Efforts to provide clean and safe water to communities when 
  supplies are interrupted

Our Quality and Safety Process

Nestlé Waters uses a 10-step process to ensure the quality and safety of our water products made in the U.S. and Canada. Click here to review our 10 Step Quality and Safety Process.

In addition to the steps described in our 10 Step Quality Process, several of our products require additional process steps.

Purified, Drinking and Flavored Waters: After source receiving and monitoring, the water typically passes through a water softener, where hardness is reduced. We then demineralize the water through reverse osmosis, and move it to storage containers where we remineralize the water, adding a specific amount of minerals to achieve a desired taste. In the future, we may also employ partial reverse osmosis, which is effective in removing some minerals, but uses less energy and reduces waste water. For our flavored waters, we also add natural fruit flavors just before bottling the water.

Sparkling Waters:  For our sparkling waters, we add carbonation just prior to bottling.

Distilled Waters: Similar to our drinking waters, the waters pass through a water softener to reduce water hardness. We then distill our waters before they are filtered.

Mineral Waters: In addition to microfiltration, we use activated alumina to remove excess fluoride in our mineral waters.

To further enhance the quality, safety and environmental aspects of our process, we are certifying all of our plants to meet the International Standards Organization (ISO) Occupational Health and Safety Assessment (OHSAS) 18001, Environmental Assessment 14001, and Food Safety 22001 standards. All of these are internationally recognized management systems. This benefits consumers by ensuring that Nestlé Waters facilities follow appropriate standardization protocols for all areas affecting quality, environment, and occupational safety and health. In addition, we have implemented internal programs that require every functional area within Nestlé Waters to develop and track progress against quality and safety goals.

Outside of our own processes, we also work with suppliers to ensure they meet agreed standards for food safety. Every year, we audit suppliers who provide critical ingredients and packaging materials (other than water, which is regulated as described in the next section) that have direct contact with our products to ensure they are complying with our internal food quality and safety protocols.

Click to see Future goals

Participate in our survey and tell us what you think of our corporate citizenship performance.

Print this section of the report