Danish tap water in cartons
Postevand is passionately driven by its CEOs and co-owners Jesper Kjeldsen and Andreas Lemche, idealists who have not deviated from their mission since they founded the company in 2014 to be the best and most sustainable alternative to spring water in plastic bottles.
Jesper met his business partner Andreas Lemche at Kaospilot, an alternative Danish business school famous for honing entrepreneurs. Whilst researching a project, they found a documentary about the US bottled water industry and started to realize their idea.
“We gave up salaries to launch Postevand because we believe in our mission and will continue to drive it while constantly looking to improve the carton with a fully renewable product. Our biggest challenge is people believing ‘are we for real?’ when we are saying ‘do not buy our product’. We have succeeded and continue to grow because we are more than just a company, and we strive to clean up our planet and remove packaging derived from fossil-fuel when there are better, more ‘no brainer’ solutions like our Pure-Pak® carton.”
As the company expects to reach 1 million cartons in 2021, Jesper Kjeldsen talks to Elotalk about his ambitious plans for his one-of-a-kind enterprise, including being the first in the world to launch a Pure-Pak® carton for water with no aluminum barrier.
“In Denmark, we have some of the best tap water in the world,” adds Jesper. “Yet, we drink over 100 million liters of bottled water every year. Water is essential to life. The way we package it in plastic is not.”
“We are starting to see the consequences of our plastics culture, and we expect that in 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish,” adds Jesper. “No matter how plastic packaging is presented – as recycled, reusable, etc. – it is still a fact that plastic comes from fossil fuels. So, for us, cartons made from renewable materials was an obvious choice.”
CLEAR SUSTAINABLE MESSAGE
The Postevand cartons have a clear message to drink from the tap wherever possible. “We are perhaps the only company in the world that encourages people not to buy their product but instead drink it for free – almost – from the tap,” says Jesper. “And we never deviate from that message, and from our main mission to be the second-best alternative to drinking from the tap.”
Despite an initial 95% drop in sales at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Postevand recorded a good summer, mostly due to the Danes staying at home. “Most Danish people stayed local this year and visited tourist destinations and the cultural institutions where we sell our product.” The unusual year also bought many new smaller customers to Postevand. “Having smaller clients makes you more grounded, a good base for 2021 where we will be launching even more sustainable packaging.”
7,000 TREES PLANTED TO DATE
To keep the Danish groundwater clean and pesticide-free, Postevand started an alliance with a Danish NGO, which plants a tree for every hundred cartons sold. More trees will be planted by Postevand from a collaboration with the Danish pop singer Mø who now owns 50% of the company. In 2020 over 7,000 trees were planted, and Jesper and Andreas are about to open their second forest in Denmark this spring. The first forest is in Billund, the home of LEGO, where trees were planted over groundwater near a reservoir. The new forest will be a ‘climate forest,’ where the trees are planted to extract the most carbon dioxide from the air.