Interview with Charles Fishman: Message in a Bottle

Image credit: Verne Equinox

The Writer

Charles Fishman has been a full-time reporter for Fast Company magazine since 1996. He is currently on leave, writing a new book, ‘The Big Thirst,’ which will be published next March.

An award-winning investigative journalist, Fishman is also the author of the ‘Wal-mart Effect,’ which appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, and was rated one of The Economist’s best books of 2006.

Fishman grew up in Miami, Florida, and graduated with a BA from Harvard University in 1983. 

The Story

In July 2007, Fast Company magazine published an article by Charles Fishman called ‘Message in a Bottle,’ which looked at the economics and psychology behind what Fishman describes as “an unlikely business boom.” 

The article describes how bottled water, a formerly virtually nonexistent business, has become an “indispensable prop” for America: a transformation largely fueled by marketing and branding, which drive home ideas about the convenience, taste and health benefits of bottled water.

“Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets--$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year,” writes Fishman.

He offers readers a behind the scenes glimpse of this billion dollar industry, journeying to three places known for their production of bottled water: the island of Fiji, San Pellegrino in Italy, and Poland Spring in Maine. The article captures a variety of perspectives, from philosopher Peter Singer’s view on bottled water being morally wrong to Whole Foods’ Chief Executive Officer John Mackey’s idea that bottled water has a “substitution effect” in that it substitutes for soda and juice, and hence isn’t causing any extra environmental damage. 

The aim of the piece, according to Fishman, is not to offer readers a definite conclusion, but rather to provide food for thought by posing the question of why people feel it necessary to consume a product that does a lot of environmental damage and has little value.

“If you scream at people they either join you in the screaming, cover their ears or they scream the opposite back at you,” says Fishman. “My job wasn’t to decide what people should do about bottled water, but to raise important issues and let readers decide for themselves.” 

The Reporting

The impetus for ‘Message in a Bottle’—although this was not readily apparent at first-- came in the form of a note Fishman received from a friend the day after he finished the manuscript for ‘The Wal-mart Effect’ in October 2005. 

“Congratulations on the book. You know what you should write about next – the bottled water industry,” wrote the friend.

Having no particular interest in, or knowledge of, the bottled water industry, Fishman wasn’t motivated into action, but filed the suggestion away as an idea he could potentially explore in the future.

Click here to read a related post on whether people can actually tell the difference between tap and bottled water in a blind taste test.

About eight weeks later, Fishman and his wife were staying in a hotel in South Florida while visiting family. Intrigued by the expensive bottles of Fiji lining the mini bar in his hotel room that claimed the water actually came all the way from Fiji, Fishman hopped online to learn more. “Where the hell was Fiji anyway?” he recalls thinking. 

A quick trip to the CIA WorldBook of Facts told him that 53 percent of the people in Fiji didn’t have access to clean drinking water on a regular basis. And yet the country’s most profitable industry was shipping bottled water to the US. “There was definitely a story here,” he says.

A few months later in 2006, while in Italy for the launch of the Italian version of The Wal-Mart Effect, Fishman decided to stop over in San Pellegrino, a small town near Milan, where he visited the San Pellegrino bottled water factory. There, among other things, Fishman learned that the carbonation in the water collected in San Pellegrino comes from carbon dioxide that is specially collected at another underground spring, and trucked to San Pellegrino where it is added to the water.

“San Pellegrino water comes to the US in a glass bottle,” he says. “That to me was in its own way as wacky as Fiji water. It’s shipped all the way from Italy so you can drink it and pee it out two hours later.”

Back in the US, Fishman went on a quest to learn everything he could about bottled water. While there were hundreds of stories that had already been written, “there hadn’t really been a good story,” he says. “No story even tried to explain why we went from not drinking bottled water to drinking bottled water. If a whole business explodes into being to provide people with something they don’t need, it’s worth asking how that happened.”

After convincing his editors at Fast Company magazine that the story was worth pursuing, Fishman began his research in earnest. He visited Poland Spring’s bottled water factory in Hollis, Maine—the largest bottled water factory in North America--where he found what he describes in his story as “a lake of Poland Spring water, conveniently celled off in plastic, extending across 6 acres, 8 feet high.”

Fishman also flew to LA to meet the owners of Fiji, a visit that offered insight into the marketing side of the bottled water industry. Bottled water companies must pitch hotels in order to have their water, rather than a competitor’s, in the mini bar or on the table at a restaurant, an exercise that translates into significant revenue for the chosen company. 

Fishman eventually managed to set up a visit to Fiji’s bottled water plant, where he spent four days learning more about the impact the company was having on the island and its people. While initially skeptical about Fiji and the idea of having bottled water flown halfway around the world, the visit did much to alter his stance. 

“It’s easy to be contemptuous and dismissive about Fiji water,” he says. “But on the ground, when you see that Fijians are actually benefiting--getting exposure to business, getting wages they wouldn’t otherwise, learning how to run a business--it all looks a lot less silly than it does in 7/11.” 

The Writing and Editing

When Fishman returned to the US from Fiji, he began preparing to write the article almost immediately. The first step was transcribing the extensive notes he had collected on his travels. 

“I had three great settings,” he recalls. These were: Poland Spring, which has a marble temple built to house the first spring; San Pellegrino, which trucks up carbon dioxide from another spring in order to carbonate its water; and the picturesque island of Fiji. 

Fishman first honed in on his theme – how and why people ended up drinking so much bottled water. He then adopted a tone: “I painted all this information with a skeptical point of view.” Finally, he looked for the reporting detail – the stories and voices that would allow him to communicate his theme in an interesting way. 

It took him about two weeks to write the article, and another week for Keith Hammonds at Fast Company to edit. Initially, the story was too long for Hammond’s liking, and Fishman had to cut much of the information he had included on the history of bottled water. 

Given the potentially data heavy nature of the topic he was exploring, Fishman was conscious of communicating the information he had collected in the most accessible way possible, presenting it in bite size chunks. “I try to connect with the way people live,” he says, referring to a sentence in his article to illustrate his point: “We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water.”

The Impact

While Fiji water called and told Fishman it was “disappointed”, by and large the story did not elicit a reaction from the bottled water companies.

The media reaction on the other hand was unprecedented: “You would have thought nobody had ever written story about bottled water before,” recalls Fishman. In the weeks after the story was published, Fishman appeared on ABC Evening News (from the offices of Fast Company), on NPR’s All Things Considered and on 5 hour-long regional NPR talk shows — In Philadelphia (WHYY), Raleigh-Durham (UWNC), Baltimore (WYPR), Minneapolis (KNOW), and San Diego (KPBS).

Fishman also appeared on Good Morning America: “They had me on in front of a huge pyramid of bottled water--hundreds of bottles--which they bought just for the 4-minute segment,” he says.

Inspired by the process of reporting and writing ‘Message in a Bottle,’ Fishman is currently working on a book about water called ‘The Big Thirst’ – due to be released next spring.