Perrier
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Perrier is a brand of bottled mineral water made from a spring in Vergèze in the Gard département of France. Perrier is carbonated; its gas content is reinforced with the gas emanating from the spring.
Perrier is available in Europe in bottles of one litre, 500 ml, and 330 ml cans. All Perrier bottles are green and have an instantly recognizable shape. It is one of the most common bottled waters in France. In August 2001 the company introduced a new bottling format using polyethylene terephthalate to offer Perrier in plastic, a change that took 11 years to decide which material would best help retain both the water's flavor and its purported "50 million bubbles."
Perrier now exists in a variety of flavours: unflavoured, flavoured with lemon, and flavoured with lime.
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[edit] History
The spring it originates from, then called Les Bouillens, was bought in 1898 by a local doctor named Louis Perrier. He later sold it to Sir St. John Harmsworth, an English aristocrat, who renamed it Source Perrier and started bottling it in green bottles shaped like the Indian clubs he used for exercise.[1] [2]
Perrier's reputation for purity suffered an embarrassing blow in 1990 when a North Carolina study reported having found benzene in the water. Source Perrier shifted from explanation to explanation on the issue, finally stating that it was an isolated incident of a worker having made a mistake in the filtering procedure and that the spring itself was completely unpolluted. The incident ultimately led to the recall of 160 million bottles of Perrier.
From 1981 to 2005, the company sponsored an annual comedy award in the United Kingdom, the Perrier Comedy Award. In 2006 it was announced that Perrier would no longer sponsor the awards and they were renamed the if.comedies after their new sponsor, Intelligent Finance.[3]
From 2002, some new varieties have been introduced in France: Eau de Perrier (less carbonated than the original one, in a blue bottle) and Perrier Fluo, with trendy tastes such as ginger-cherry, peppermint,orange-litchi, raspberry or ginger-lemon.
In 2004, a crisis erupted when the Nestlé group, owner of Perrier, announced a restructuring plan of Perrier. In 2005, Perrier was ordered to halt restructuring, because of a failure to consult adequately with staff.[4]
[edit] In popular culture
- In the film Spaceballs, a spoof of Star Wars, the main villains breathe canned "Perri-air" as their planet had no natural air left.
- In 2006, Perrier was chosen to be the sponsor of Jean Girard, Ricky Bobby's rival, in the film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The choice of Perrier as the sponsor makes sense, as Girard is French.
- In "Weird Al" Yankovic's song This is the Life, an enormously wealthy man's bathtub is "filled with Perrier".
- In the James Bond film GoldenEye, a Russian tank piloted by Bond crashes into a giant truck carrying Perrier. Afterwards, Perrier employees took on the painstaking task of retrieving all the bottles, intact or broken. This was to avoid having black marketeers in Russia sell "counterfeit" Perrier using the bottles.[citation needed]
- In the song "I Won't Share You" by The Smiths from the album Strangeways, Here We Come, the brand is mentioned in the line "has the Perrier gone straight to my head?"
[edit] Notes
- ^ Template:Cite web Perrier Bottles dadude123.JPG
- ^ Tomlinson, Richard (2004-11-29). TROUBLED WATERS AT PERRIER. Fortune. Retrieved on July 28, 2006.
- ^ "Perrier ends Edinburgh comedy tie", BBC, 2006-06-14. Retrieved on December 31, 2006.
- ^ Perrier Restructuring Halted
