Nestlé Faces Lawsuit For Mislabeling Common Ground Water As Spring Water

By Aaron Kesel

A group of concerned citizens has brought a 325-page class action lawsuit against Nestlé Waters North America, the company that owns Poland Spring, alleging that the Maine business has long deceived their customers by mislabeling common groundwater as “spring water,” Courthouse News reported.

The lawsuit was filed in a Connecticut federal court on Tuesday accusing Nestlé Waters North America Inc. of a “colossal fraud perpetrated against American consumers.”

The civil suit was brought by 11 people who are seeking millions of dollars in damages seeking whether the sources of Poland Spring’s water meets the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) definition of a spring.

The suit alleges that the Poland Springs’ wells in Poland, Maine, Hollis, Fryeburg, Denmark, Dallas Plantation, Pierce Pond Township and Kingfield have never been scientifically proven to be connected to a spring and draw in surface water, which cannot legally be called spring water.

The suit further claims that Poland Springs has “politically compromised” state regulators and interweaving its interests with those of state government. “Rather than being collected from ‘pristine mountain or forest springs as the images on those labels depict, Poland Spring Water products all contain ordinary ground water that defendant collects from wells it drilled in saturated plains or valleys where the water table is within a few feet of the earth’s surface,’ the lawsuit claims.”

What’s more, the group claims that the real spring dried up fifty years ago adding that the source which Poland Spring gets their water from “sites near waste and garbage dumps.”

In a statement to the publication, a Nestlé Waters spokesperson stated that its water meets all relevant federal and state regulations on the classification and collection of spring water and that the suit is “an obvious attempt to manipulate the legal system for personal gain.”

“The claims made in the lawsuit are without merit,” said a spokesperson for Nestlé Waters. “Poland Spring is 100 percent spring water.”

This isn’t the first time Nestlé Waters has faced allegations that they were lying to customers selling fraudulent spring water. In 2003, the company settled a class action lawsuit alleging that Poland Spring water doesn’t come from a spring by agreeing to pay $10 million in discounts to consumers and charity contributions.

In 2007, Aquafina, a competitor to Poland Spring ran by Pepsi Co, admitted that its own bottled water was not purified water or spring water, but simply plain old tap water.

While another competitor, Dasani, states on its website that they maintain their bottled water comes from local water supplies and is then filtered.

“We don’t believe that consumers are confused about the source of Dasani water,” Coca-Cola spokeswoman Diana Garza Ciarlante said. “The label clearly states that it is purified water.”

A group called Corporate Accountability International has been pressuring bottled water sellers to stop their misleading marketing practices for years. The group runs the “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign which “promotes, protects and ensures public funding for our public water systems and challenges the misleading marketing of the bottled-water industry,” according to its website stopcorporateabuse.org.

Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post and is Director of Content for Coinivore. Follow Aaron at Twitter and Steemit.

This article is Creative Commons and can be republished in full with attribution. Like Activist Post on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, follow on Twitter and at Steemit.


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11 Comments on "Nestlé Faces Lawsuit For Mislabeling Common Ground Water As Spring Water"

  1. Nestle is up there with the other criminally immoral corporations, such as Monsanto.

  2. Qui bono? Probable a competitor like Pepsi owned Dasani and a globalist law firm.

    • Isn’t Nestle headquartered in Switzerland ? Owned and operated by the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia ? Or did someone give me some wrong info once upon a time ?

      • Everything is owned by the Rothschild Khazarian mafia
        because currency is issued as a debt to European jewish families who are now secret TRILLIONAIRES buying all the corpses of this flat world.

  3. I have warned people for years that govt allows municipal water to be labeled Spring Water because it once came from a spring. It is akin the the “natural” label on our foods; means nothing of the sort. Spending a fortune on bottled water is pointless if it is not RO filtered. Even though you may get out the chlorine taste the fluoride is still in it along with many other toxins that RO can remove.
    The plastic toxins & garbage pollution is a whole other matter. If you can’t have a well that is tested regularly then installing an RO system in you house is way more economical & less work than lugging bottled water. For under $1000[ financing available] you can buy a quality system like Culligan [beware cheaper ones the membrane breaks down & bacteria will grow on it] & have it installed including your fridge’s icemaker. Producing 15 gallons daily for cooking, drinking, pets, etc works out to pennies a day per gallon instead of nearly $1per.

  4. Nestle – on eof the most evil companies on the planet – the CEO wants to monetize all food and water…I have a Berkey water filter – perople never buy Aquafina or Dasani especially – waste of your money – invest in a Berkey and you will never worry about your water again….

  5. also there is a great website called http://www.findaspring.com I think that is it – anyway they list all the free sources of pure spring water..you can go and fill up your bottes yourself

  6. They didn’t mislabel. They lied through their teeth and did everything they could to cover it up.

  7. To give you just a TINY idea of what a sleazy/owned bunch polluting this (LOL) “great” nation is, these corporate scum USE the D.C. whores/our blood/our honor/our money to CRUSH smaller nations into “compliance” deemed worthy by int’l/kosher corporations to “deal with” insuring same has unfettered access to their resources, (world bank “grants” a loan there’s no possible way for the nation to repay, then “takes” those resources – those in the know call these motherf**kers “vultures”)
    Take a few minutes to learn just what a bunch of maggots these filth are, especially the slick way they pervert int’l laws to suit their bottom line;

    http://youtu.be/mUK8NmdcKvc

  8. The exact same thing is happening at Nestle’s Zephyrhills Florida facility. However, the groundwater in this region was identified as having PCB’s.

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