30 GALLONS OF WATER FOR ONE MILE ON ETHANOL

Apparently it takes 600 gallons of water to grow the corn to produce one gallon of ethanol. For a car that achieves 20 miles per gallon of ethanol, that means a water footprint of 30 gallons per mile. My thanks to Doug in the US for this information. As he says – Awful.

ACTUAL WATER AND VIRTUAL WATER

Everything we consume and everything we make requires water. Sometimes it’s easy to tell, more often not.

A litre of water is just that. A litre of milk or orange juice contains other nutrients.

But milk and juice take a lot more water to grow the grass or produce the fruit. As well as more water to rinse the processing machinery. And even more water to build the factories. So it goes on.

It is said to take an extra ½ to 1 litre of actual water* to produce 1 litre of bottled water and another 7 to 7½ litres of embedded water or virtual water for the processing, packaging and transport – adding up to 9 litres in all.

A fascinating new study from WWF shows that the average British citizen uses an amazing 4,645 litres of virtual water per day. Some of this is in clothing. Almost two thirds is in products sourced from other countries.

Yet the amount of actual water we use in a day is 150 litres – mainly through washing and toilets. Of that, we drink just 1.1 litres from taps.

Even if we drank our full daily requirement of 2 litres a day from bottles and multiply that by 9, it’s a mere 0.4% of our virtual water use. It would probably also be the most important 0.4%.

To me, that puts the whole debate about water into perspective.

Here’s a tiny healthy amount doing massive good. But some people are intent on condemning it.

I’ve read many other intriguing articles about water footprints. Here are some of the more extraordinary comparisons**:

Leather shoes	1 pair		8,000 litres
Beef	1 serving	4oz	1,500 litres
Milk	1 glass	200ml	200 litres
Orange juice	1 glass	200ml	170 litres
Coffee	1 cup	140ml	150 litres
Egg	1	40g	135 litres
Wine	1 glass	125ml	120 litres
Beer	1 glass	250ml	75 litres
Bottled water	1 glass	200ml	2 litres

Shouldn’t we all be more virtuous with the actuality ?

* 0.81 litres for Nestlé: The Nestlé Creating Shared Value Report, March 2008 ** Bottled Water Reporter, February/March 2008

VERBAL ABUSE IN PRODUCT NAMES

There was a time when Democratic Republics were anything but Democratic. In food products, the words ‘fresh’ and ‘natural’ have often been open to widely differing interpretations. But verbal abuse in product names has become rife. Since returning from my summer holiday, I have noted four such examples. In The Grocer on 16th August there was mention of a brand called Vodkat Smoothies. This highly alcoholic drink seems a very long way away from pure fruit smoothies to me. The article was next to a piece about a Chilean wine producer developing a blueberry functional wine drink, described as “the Red Bull of wine”. Yes, word for word. The summer edition of Italy’s Il Mondo della Birra reported on Aqua 21 – a new grape liqueur with 21% alcohol by volume. Not so much aqua, but I took it all in good spirit. This was beaten by a nose, however, when France’s LSA on 4th September provided an update on the geographic expansion of the US energy drink Cocaine, which contains 3.5 times the caffeine of most other energy drinks and fortunately none of what it says on the tin. I suspect anyone reading this will have other examples and look forward to sharing them.

SMOOTHIES AND ENERGY DRINKS : ME-TOO PERILS

What do smoothies and energy drinks have in common ? They’re both non-alcoholic drinks. They’re relatively expensive. Portion sizes are often small. Both have benefits. Yet smoothies are proudly natural, while energy drinks are rarely so. One is thick, the other thin. One is marketed because of taste, the other sometimes despite it. One is consumed earlier in the day, the other later. Anything else ? Yes. Have you noticed the similarity in their market dynamics ? Energy drinks shot up when one brand led the way and most others copied it. As with Red Bull, so with Innocent. There have been an amazing number of me-toos as well as me-too-leapfrogs in countries where the brand leaders had yet to enter. Most fell, are falling or will fall by the wayside. Brand leaders need competition, but above all competition that differentiates and takes the market forward. Hansen did that with Monster in the United States. The UK smoothie market has already floored a succession of heavyweights as well as lightweights. Good luck to the genuine innovators, but beware the slipstream. Consumers want copyright not copycats.