JANO Water Aims to Deepen the Flow of Wealth to New Brunswick
VILLAGE-BLANCHARD–A natural spring water bottling and distribution company is ramping up their presence to let New Brunswick and beyond know that their quality product is as strong as ever.
JANO Natural Spring Water prides itself in its superior taste and consistency. Coming from a natural spring running just outside the town limits of Caraquet, JANO water boasts a low mineral salt content of 83 parts per million, a feature that played a part in their bronze medal win this year at the world renowned Berkeley International Water Tasting competition.
Following the win, JANO owner Bruno St-Onge felt the time was right to make the investment of time and money to establish a greater reach for the company by making more people aware of its existence and spreading its reach farther.
“We’re currently serving about three-quarters of the province and a little bit of Nova Scotia,” JANO controller Jacques Lanteigne explains. “We launched this new brand to bring us further … [St-Onge] decided to invest some more money in development and modernization to become more efficient.”
Lanteigne says that competition in the bottled water market is high. With competitors like Coke, Pepsi and Nestle, it’s clear that JANO has their work cut out for them. But Lanteigne believes their product speaks for itself.
Lanteigne says that the most tangible proof that their water is superior is its consistency of taste as a result of the lower mineral salt content. He challenges anyone to leave three bottles of water (Dasani, Aquafina and their JANO brand) in their car for an extended period of time and see which has changed the least in taste. He guarantees that it will be JANO.
“Most bottled water consumed in New Brunswick is produced elsewhere,” Lanteigne says. “We’re not inventing a need here, we’re simply answering to a current need. There are all kinds of ways to do that but for us, one of the important first steps was both to increase our efficiency in terms of production as a group, … increase our productivity and increase our reach in terms of the market.”
“We’ve been serving, for example, … the south-east and the south-west [New Brunswick] market for a fairly long time, but we have not done as much work as we could have in terms of reaching out to more customers and now we’re doing that and we’re having success because the people we reach out to like our product.
JANO is staying competitive by continuing to invest in what they’re doing. Lanteigne says they’re investing in their people, their facilities and their equipment by increasing the quality of training and staying up to date with the most efficient bottling processes. He says that beyond having the resources available to deliver their product, they also need to deliver the best service possible to their customers.
“Nowadays, service is almost the ultimate thing. All other things being equal, it’s the person who offers the better service that gets the contract. We’re striving for that,” Lanteigne says. “We’re striving to reach out to more people.”
With such a small price differential between competitors when it comes to bottled water, Lanteigne says service is a big issue for them. They currently offer delivery to homes, businesses and temporary company sites and will soon offer access to an e-commerce site where customers will be able to order refills of their 18.9-litre bottles online. This is all part of their aim to be more efficient and deliver water they consider not a luxury item, but a necessary human need.
Lanteigne says JANO delivers not only on the quality front but on the sustainable front as well. He says that since their 18.9-litre bottles are reused, there’s less waste than is often associated with the bottled water industry. He explains that having this spring water is especially crucial for areas of the province where drinking water is no good or simply unavailable.
“The research we’ve done shows that before the water springs to the surface because we don’t pump it, it’s gone through a seven-year cycle of filtering. This indeed is specific to this part of the province,” he says.
“The founders decided to exploit this resource and exploit it in a sustainable way because this is very important. That’s what we’re continuing to do… We’re very proud to create jobs and in that sense we’re proud to create wealth. The spring itself is there, it exists, the water flows. If we don’t use it, and we definitely don’t use it all, the rest of the water actually flows into the sea. We basically [use] the resources that are there. By doing so, we create wealth.”