Expensive tap water with "special additives"

However, after it became known in 2004 that it was expensive tap water, there was of course bad press. In addition, an episode of the British sitcom "Fools and Horses" appeared in which the main characters want to bottle and sell water from the tap.

In order to get away with it, the product was advertised with rather incomprehensible terms such as "multi-barrier filtration" and "reverse osmosis", and it was also claimed that the water had undergone "a technique perfected by NASA for purifying liquids in spacecraft".

However, the water supplier Thames Water was annoyed by this, because now it sounded as if their tap water had not been purified and was therefore not actually drinkable. In this respect, Thames Water explained that their water was already going through a purification phase of 9 stages. Then in blind tests, it also turned out that the test subjects could not taste any difference between Dasani and the tap water.

Things went further awry for Coca Cola when they launched their online marketing campaign promoting Dasani as "full of spunk" and "bottled spunk," which drew even more ridicule from the public and the media. Because in the UK, "spunk" is a slang term for sperm....

And then illegal levels of bromate were also found in Dasani - unfortunately, due to Coca Cola's filtering process, the water was contaminated with about twice the legal amount (10 micrograms per liter) of a potentially carcinogenic compound, namely bromate.

The PR nightmare thus reached its climax, and Dasani was withdrawn from the UK and the planned launch of Dasani in certain other regions of Europe was cancelled.