NEW YORK -- Nestle Waters North America president and CEO Kim Jeffery was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award during the recent Beverage Forum held in New York.
No single figure looms larger in the bottled-water industry than our honoree today, Michael Bellas, chairman and CEO of the Beverage Marketing Corp. told Beverage Forum attendees. Bellas added that like the previous winners of the award, Jeffery has played a leading role in changing the beverage industry's competitive landscape. In Kim's case, he has played a huge part in building the [image-nocss] U.S. bottled-water market as we know it today.
In accepting the honor, Jeffery said the award really belonged to the 9,000 employees of Greenwich, Conn.-based Nestl a Waters. [They] truly are the ones who have made this company so successful. I don't care how good your strategy is; if you can't execute it, it doesn't mean anything. And this is a very, very committed and competitive group of people, and I can't tell you how much fun they've made it for me to come to work every day. It's a very, very special thing that we have at our company, he said.
He also had words of warning for the industry. I think we're in a difficult place as a beverage industry today, he said. Even bottled water, which is a healthful beverage with no calories, a beverage which uses less water per gallon of finished product than any other beverage in America, finds itself demonized by certain groups of people.
To counter this, he urged the industry to move toward sustainability and recommended three steps:
Reduce the use of plastic in its containers. Work to fund research to commercialize the next generation of packaging made from renewable resources. Embrace and get behind efforts to enact recycling programs that are more comprehensive than current container legislation and that care for all recyclable containers, regardless of whether they contain beverages or laundry detergent or peanut butter.Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.