They're drinking it up in New York

At 16, Zucker started a business enticing people to pay $1 to take a swing at a golf ball. The prize for a hole in one from 150 yards: $1 million. He rented space from a driving range and persuaded an insurance company to allow him to pay a premium for a million-dollar policy. No one made it, but Zucker made some extra cash.

In college, at Miami University in Ohio, Zucker started a discount card company, pitching local businesses to give students bargains. He collected revenue from advertisers that paid for space on his discount cards, and from college bookstores that bought the cards and gave them as loyalty gifts to customers.

He sold the business at 22 for what he said was a "great profit," and moved to New York, where he launched a toy and gift wholesaling company, selling a million name bracelets.

In 2006, he bought the Hampton's Honey Co., a farm stand brand that he expanded. It was his introduction to the growing local food movement, in which consumers support farmer's markets and neighborhood breweries, keeping money in the state. The honey became a top-selling brand in Whole Foods in the New York region.

One night in 2007, over a restaurant dinner with cold glasses of tap water, Zucker and a friend got to talking about New York water and why it's so good. He noticed many New York restaurants had also started serving tap water.

Meanwhile, in Berkeley, Calif., a high-end restaurant, Chez Panisse, had banned bottled water, and city governments in Seattle and San Francisco ordered municipal offices to stop buying it.

That's when it hit him. "Somebody should be bottling New York water," he said.

Zucker sold his honey company and used the income, along with investments from friends and family, to launch Tap'd NY in October 2008.

To bottle the stuff, Zucker and his business partner, Jon Flax, 26, who was recruited from Craigslist, pump the water together from a main in a Brooklyn warehouse they rent. Their water bill costs about $2 for every 748 gallons. They fill up a 5,300-gallon leased tanker truck, hiring a driver to transport the water 12 miles across the river to New Jersey to be bottled.

Studies, including one by the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, have found that most bottled water sold in stores is essentially tap water extracted from aquifers, lakes and springs.

Like other bottled water companies, Tap'd NY treats its water through a filtration process to cut down on unnatural colors or tastes that chlorine and other substances in pipes may have left behind.