Kansas City's Bottled Water Experiences

Abstract

This article describes the Kansas City (MO) Water Services Department experience with bottling and selling its own water. The reasons for doing this included the city's extensive strategic planning process during the 1990s, emphasizing customer service and additional income sources, and an excess of treatment plant production capacity of 240 mgd because of less‐than‐expected growth in industrial usage. The process covers such issues as working with a marketing consultant, benchmarking decisions, marketing techniques, startup costs, management issues, and goal fulfillment.