About
Antipodes Water Company have been operating since 2003 and have only been exporting in small amounts over the last 2 years. In 2007, we reached the capacity for our then current bottling machine and decided that the time was right to invest in a state of the art machine and take Antipodes to the world.
The plant development and subsequent wetland and re-forestation projects while on-going have been in planning for over a year now, on 29 March 08 our new facility was officially opened by the Minster of Conservation.
Philosophy
The meaning of the word Antipodes is at the very heart of our water – it is quite literally poles apart. Prior to Antipodes, most of the bottled water on the tables of New Zealand’s best restaurants came from Europe. That got us thinking, why are we taking water from some of the most intensely industrialized land on earth and shipping it all the way to one of the world’s purest sources of water? We thought it was time some water started moving in the opposite direction.
Our second point of difference is the way our water looks. We wanted to be the opposite of “look at me”. We didn’t want Antipodes to dominate the table with height or strongly coloured glass. Our desire was to compliment the finest table settings and the finest of food with cool, clean simplicity that enhanced not only what’s inside the bottle but also what’s surrounding it. Our third point of difference is our distribution system. We didn’t want guests who had enjoyed Antipodes with their meal at a fine restaurant to see it lining the shelves of their local supermarket or liquor outlet the next morning. For this reason Antipodes is distributed exclusively to restaurants, accommodation and private function industries as well as on line “to your door” deliveries. It is not available off the shelf through retail outlets.
The Water
Design and distribution are very important examples of why Antipodes is different. They are, however, nowhere near as important as the quality of our water. New Zealand Water is across the board renowned for its purity. Antipodes is sourced from a deep aquifer of 490 – 985 feet. To quote the Geohydrological Assessment of the BOPRC Technical Publication No.2, 1998: “The groundwater of the Aquifer, as represented by the water from the Bore No 932 (Antipodes) is of very high quality. It has been recognized as the deepest, highest quality groundwater in New Zealand.”
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Strategy
The philosophy behind the Antipodes Water Company is a simple one. To produce the world’s best water, from the world’s purest country. In striving to meet this mandate it became clear that within this philosophy is an in-built ethical requirement to ensure that we preserve the environment that is supplying us with this product.
This train of thought set the search in progress to find a way to measure our carbon footprint, as we were the first premium bottled water company in the world to attempt this we realised early that we would need guidance in the form of the carboNZero programme (Landcare Research NZ) who helped us through the initial stages of measurement, then assisted us in creating a management plan with a view to the expected growth of the company, finally they facilitated the purchase of EBEX21 carbon credits to offset our remaining emissions.
As the company has plans to make additional growth offshore in the next 5 years we are now working with carboNZero on a plan that will allow Antipodes to be not only carbon neutral to any restaurant table, anywhere in the world (as of 07/08 financial year), but carbon positive through the development of a wetland and native forest re-planting project on the site of our bottling facility.
To reduce our footprint Antipodes has put in place various practices and targets, since we were in the process of building a state of the art bottling facility to meet to export demand it made sense to build into this facility some carbon reduction features such as the inclusion of solar panelling to provide heating, the re-use of rinse water (pure bore water) to re-charge the wetland project and any run off water to be used for grey-water purposes, and a personal project of Simon Woolley (owner & CEO) the re-planting of a native Kahikatea forest around the wetland project.
As the offshore sales grow, so do the air miles to service these markets, in an effort to combat these, Antipodes has taken the decision to place a permanent staff member in each major region to reduce the travel from NZ, they are also upgrading all laptops to those fitted with video conferencing capabilities in an effort to reduce travel for face to face meetings, the flow on effect is that these units are more energy efficient. On the domestic front Antipodes has started to purchase a small fleet of efficient diesel powered vehicles for the travelling sales team to help reduce their emissions contribution. Internally the staff have taken it upon themselves to work towards a paperless office, introducing electronic document management systems in both the bottling facility and the distribution/head office unit and all areas now have designated recycling bins for paper, plastics and glass.
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Photo Gallery