Late last summer, experts predicted that Americans would soon reach an important beverage milestone. We were close to the point where we would be purchasing more bottled water than sweetened soft drinks. According to a new report, we’ve finally passed that point, gulping 12.8 billion gallons from bottles in 2016, an increase of 9% from 2015.
This news comes courtesy of the Beverage Marketing Corp., which contends that this shift toward bottle water is the result of a cultural change. To use the report’s just-a-bit hyperbolic language, we’ve gradually come to realize that bottled water is “the ultimate portable and affordable beverage,” which eventually “spawned new usage occasions and habits.”
