NEW YORK — Two teachers on their lunch break scanned a refrigerated shelf inside a Manhattan coffee shop lined with drink bottles: Naked Juice, Perrier, Smartwater, New York City tap water.
"Tap water?" said Alison Szeli, 26, picking up the clear plastic bottle with orange letters: "Tap'd NY. Purified New York City tap water."
She studied the description: "No glaciers were harmed in making this water." She compared prices: Smartwater cost $1.85. Tap'd NY was 35 cents less.
Szeli and her co-worker went for tap, carrying the bottles to the cash register.
"It's cheaper," Szeli said. "Water is all the same anyway. I just prefer to buy my own water in bottles."
A few feet away, a scruffy-haired 29-year-old in jeans and a striped shirt delivered a shipment of Tap'd NY out of a rented Scion. Craig Zucker, founder of Tap'd NY, stopped unloading long enough to notice the two customers buying his brand. He smiled.
In the five months since he started the company, he has proved his hunch: People are willing to pay for New York City tap water, and not just in monthly utility bills.
"It doesn't require energy or pumping," Zucker said, "and it's so pure and clean."
It is, after all, one of the nation's healthiest water supplies -- so fresh that in 2007 the Environmental Protection Agency said it did not need filtration. New York pizza and bagel makers have long credited local water as a special baking ingredient. It goes down soft, without hints of tart-tasting minerals or chlorine like other public water systems.
The water comes from a system of 19 reservoirs and three lakes in upstate New York -- some flowing to the city from as far as 125 miles away. Most of the supply is protected and filtered by the natural processes of upstate ecosystems. It dissolves natural minerals while traveling over land or through the ground.
Michael Saucier, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, notes that the city's water beat 150 other municipal water systems in New York state in a taste test last summer.
But how was a New Yorker able to enjoy that fresh taste when out of the house? As Zucker explained, "There aren't necessarily fountains or places to get clean water on every street in New York."
The solution was simple. Especially to a man who discovered his entrepreneurial spirit at age 8, when he started a lemonade stand in Cleveland. Since then, he has always kept about 20 business ideas in a drawer.
