The shelves with mineral water in many supermarkets and discounters were suddenly empty or only weakly filled last year. Especially Edeka and Netto were affected. For many years, the two retail chains primarily sourced the mineral water that they sell as their own brands at a lower price than the well-known branded products from the beverages group of the Middle Franconian entrepreneurial family Schäff. They in turn pumped it out of the ground from their “Urstromquelle” in Baruth in Brandenburg. But then she wanted more money; the price negotiations failed in spring 2022 and Edeka and Netto had to look for new suppliers at short notice. They found them in France and in the Rhön.
Edeka doesn’t want to let it get that far. A few days ago, the Hamburg headquarters of the cooperative trading association announced that the wholly-owned Edeka subsidiary Sonnländer Drinks GmbH would take over Petrusquelle in Siegsdorf on April 1. It previously belonged to the Staatliche Mineralbrunnen AG based in Bad Berneck in Upper Franconia. It was not known how much Edeka paid for the mineral water manufacturer from the Traunstein district. Edeka promised to take over all 45 employees at Petrusquelle and also to keep the brand. According to the retail giant, the purchase serves the sole purpose of ensuring its own “independence and flexibility” and security of supply. What Edeka did not say: As a producer and user at the same time, the collateral benefit lies in being able to determine the prices for mineral water alone in the future, regardless of what suppliers charge.
The deal is timely. All over the country, retail and beverage giants secure direct access to mineral water deposits in order to secure their business in the long term. These are the first offshoots of a distribution battle that will gain momentum. Because climate change is causing the underground water reserves in this country to shrink drastically; less water comes in from the top than is taken from the bottom. According to Environment Minister Thorsten Glauber (FW), groundwater recharge alone has declined by around a fifth in the past ten years. At the same time, the demand for water is increasing in the hot, dry summers that have become increasingly frequent. If there is precipitation, it is sometimes so heavy that the water masses cannot be absorbed by the ground and are simply washed away by rivers.
Against this background, more and more citizens at the locations of mineral water companies are questioning their business model: Can a private company simply withdraw, bottle and sell groundwater that belongs to the general public, with the profits naturally going into private and not public coffers?
The first major public debate about this was four years ago and took place in Treuchtlingen. There, where the Schäff family has created one of the largest mineral water companies in Germany from their small local brewery since the 1980s. When the company pursued the plan for its core brand Altmühltaler in 2019 to pump a further 300,000 cubic meters of deep groundwater per year in Treuchtlingen in addition to the already permitted 250,000 cubic meters, the State Office for the Environment rejected this. Simply because it is 10,000 years old and particularly pure and therefore valuable deep groundwater, whose reserves are also dwindling.
You have to know all of this in order to understand why the mineral water market has started to move, right down to the sale of the Siegsdorfer Petrusquelle. A key driver was Altmühltaler. Shortly after the supply relationship with Edeka and Netto broke up, the Schäffs began to dismantle their mineral water company. Big names struck as buyers. First, Germete Heil- und Mineralquellen GmbH, based in Warburg (North Rhine-Westphalia), went to the beer brewer Krombacher. A little later, the Schäffs sold the Urstromquelle in Baruth to the Austrian company Red Bull and its bottler, the juice manufacturer Rauch. And finally, the Schäffs sold their core Altmühltaler brand, including the Treuchtlingen and Breuna (Hesse) locations, to Aldi Nord.
The deal is scheduled to go through on March 1st and the public will be informed a week later. Considering the distribution battle in 2019, when many people mobilized against Altmühltaler’s expansion plans, distrust in and around Treuchtlingen is again great. Especially since Aldi Nord only vaguely announced that it wanted to invest in both locations beyond the announcement of the Altmühltaler purchase. But what does that mean? Is it again about increased abstraction of groundwater? Or should the mineral water factory, which has so far been located in the city center, be relocated to the outskirts, which Treuchtlingen would have nothing against?
At the same time as the sale, Altmühltaler carried out test drilling with the aim of tapping near-surface groundwater layers instead of the valuable deep groundwater. It looks like this could work. The test drilling had shown “that the quantity and quality of the water found from the higher-lying iron sandstone can be used to replace deep groundwater from the sandstone Keuper,” said the responsible district office in Weißenburg. But the authority is also urging the public water suppliers that use the deep groundwater to find alternatives. Overall consumption has to go down. And massive.
Groundwater is free in Bavaria
For decades, the general public showed little or no interest in such issues. There was always enough water, in Bavaria anyway. Certainly, the north of the Free State has always been a dry area compared to the wet foothills of the Alps. But the construction of the Main-Danube Canal and the Franconian Lake District serve their purpose; they channel water across the watershed from south to north. But now more and more people are concerned about their drinking water, even in southern Bavaria. In Polling in the district of Mühldorf, for example, a citizens’ initiative (BI) is making a front against plans by the food and baby food manufacturer Innfood to also produce mineral water in the future. Or in Bergen not far from Siegsdorf, where another BI is worried that the well-known mineral water brand Adelholzener is sucking even more deep groundwater out of the ground than before. Before that, it had to be hydrogeologically clarified that the withdrawals were not harmful to the groundwater stock, according to BI’s demand.
Basically, the Free State is a paradise for mineral water producers. As one of only three federal states, Bavaria does not charge a water cent, i.e. no water withdrawal fee. Whether private companies, mineral water producers or farmers – they are all allowed to fetch groundwater from the ground and use it free of charge. The other generous states are Hesse and Thuringia. The state government actually wanted to introduce the water cent during this legislative period. But she postponed that indefinitely.