More on Nestle’s Attempt at Legal Bullying of Miami Water Utility

Yesterday’s story about Nestle’s legal bullying of a Florida water utility continues to gather steam.

Today, the Palm Beach Post ran a short Associated Press article about Nestle’s heavy-handed attempt to stifle ads promoting Miami-Dade’s tap water.

Nestle’s over-the-top rhetoric (“It’s an attack on the integrity of the company,” said Nestle spokesman
Jim McClellan.”) was bound to cause some of us to take notice, and no doubt, that was the intent.

Even heavyweight environmental site Grist found the story too juicy to pass up; here’s a short commentary from Grist:

For months, the bottled-water industry has been losing its grip over people’s pocketbooks.
Consumers are realizing that buying purified tap water at pumped-up
prices, packaged in little plastic bottles, makes zero sense in
economic, ecological, or health terms.

Now the industry appears to be losing its grip on reality. From the Miami Herald:

In the radio ad, a talking faucet extols Miami-Dade’s tap water as cheaper, purer and safer than bottled water. It
may have sounded innocuous to most listeners, but the 30-second spot
left the nation’s largest purveyor of bottled water boiling mad. Nestle
Waters North America, which makes nearly $4 billion a year selling
Zephyrhills and other brands, is threatening to sue if the county
doesn’t kill commercials the company brands as false advertising.

Yesterday, I asked when Nestle was going to reform its predatory business practices in favor of more engaging, tactics. Instead, the multinational – under the pressure of slowing market growth and a lot of pushback from formerly compliant rural towns – seems to be responding with hollow PR campaigns and yes, legal bullying.

UPDATE: ABC News also weighed in with a short article about Nestle’s tirade, though there isn’t much new here.

Nestle waters of north america, nestle, bottled water, miami-dade