Lofoten Arctic Water: A revolution in water retail

TEXT: EVA-KRISTIN U. PEDERSEN

Lofoten Arctic Water takes on competitors in water retail with an exclusive, eternally recyclable aluminium bottle.

It is everything that you’d think of as Norwegian: pure, fresh, cold, uncontaminated. Lofoten Arctic Water comes from a mountain lake, tucked away among the breathtakingly beautiful peaks of the Lofoten Islands – one of Norway’s most valued destinations.

Superior-stamped

Things really started to happen for Lofoten Arctic Water in 2016, when new investors came in and enhanced the tapping of still water from the lake on 888-millilitre glass bottles intended mainly for the restaurant market. In 2018, they finalised their own bottling facilities in Gravdal, only nine kilometres from the water source.

Lofoten Arctic Water quickly gained recognition from The Fine Water Academy, which gave the small Norwegian producer a Superior stamp because of the completely negligible levels of minerals in the water.

Lofoten Arctic Water: A revolution in water retail

Good for quenching thirst. Photo: Maksym Tychavski

A forever recyclable bottle

Now that they are presenting a new, on-the-go version of their product, what the small team at Lofoten Arctic Water believes gives them a cutting edge compared to their competitors is not so much the premium quality of their water, but the material: the 473-millilitre bottle is made of aluminium, a complete novelty when it comes to water on the Norwegian and most of the European markets.

“Glass is heavy and transport became a real challenge for us. We were looking for alternatives, but plastic wasn’t one of them. We didn’t want to contribute to filling up the ocean with more plastic,” says Cecilie Qvigstad Williksen, sales and marketing coordinator at Lofoten Arctic Water.

The choice fell on the Alumi-Tek® bottle, produced by Ball Corporation. “It’s really a can that’s narrower at the top and that has a screw cap,” Williksen explains. But more importantly, she stresses, it is forever recyclable. In the world at large, some 75 per cent of all aluminium ever produced is still in use.

Award-winning design

The production of aluminium bottled water started in 2020, but the pandemic delayed any major marketing offensive. “It’s really just now that we are able to start making ourselves known,” explains Williksen excited.

The company nevertheless used the pandemic well, enabling a new production line with aluminium bottles directly at their facilities in Gravdal.

“We are so lucky to have good water almost everywhere in Norway,” says Williksen, “but we’re not used to buying water in bottles that are not transparent so that we can see the water we are about to drink.”

The sleek, environmentally super-friendly aluminium bottle filled with Lofoten Arctic Water might just change that in the time to come.