A few years ago, drinking water from a tetra pack in India would have been a ridiculed concept. Why would anyone pay more than a few rupees to purchase mineral sips, let alone invest in a throwaway box that masquerades as a portable billboard? Cut to 2025. The waterscape has evolved radically and a flurry of brands in tetra pack water are now busy jockeying for visibility as healthy, sustainability-ninja, thirst busters. Gear up to spend more – boring water just went boujie.
Says Geetanjali Gupta, co-founder, Kevala Niru Water Packaging Private Limited and Gable Top Packaging Private Limited, “This regulatory change aligned with our ongoing R&D and allowed us to move forward with commercial plans. Since 2021 we have been exploring alternative packaging formats suitable for water. During our travels, we saw how innovatively water was being packaged across the world. When we came across gable top cartons, usually used for dairy, we instantly knew they were the perfect match for the kind of water experience we wanted to create.” Geetanjali joined forces with her sister-in-law Anupama Gupta to come up with Kevala Niru – that means ‘Only Water’ in Kannada. “The idea was to reflect the simplicity and purity of water, and appeal to a younger, design-conscious audience,” she says.
A drop of change
Earlier, government regulations required 70 per cent transparency in packaging water. The gamechanger moment arrived in 2024 when the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) issued a notification allowing Natural Mineral Water and Packaged Drinking Water to be sold in opaque packaging such as multilayer paper-based formats like Tetra Pak, Gable Top cartons, and aluminium cans. With tetra pack water de rigueur in the US, Europe, and Asia, across five-star spaces and supermarkets, the trend has now trickled into India.
Shilpi Madan for Zee Zest