Holy Water, or Go with the Flow

In May of 1992 John V.R. King '57 had an epiphany of sorts. It happened on a Dartmouth Alumni College Abroad trip down the Volga River shepherded by Associate Professor Heide Whelan of the history department. A highlight of the cruise, on a yacht originally built for Leonid Brezhnev, was a visit with a Russian Orthodox bishop at a church in Kostroma, 200 miles northeast of Moscow. Bishop Aleksandr simultaneously lamented his church's sorry financial situation after 70 years of Soviet rule and bragged about the exceptional purity of the natural springs the church controlled. John King put two and dva together.

Now, four years later, Aleksandr has been promoted to archbishop and King is running the most successful bottling and marketing company in Russia. Each month in Moscow alone Saint Springs water sells more than 100,000 liters and generates income in excess of $1 million. This despite the fact that when King established his liaison with the Russian church he knew little or nothing about the bottling business, water, or Russia. He was a retired plastics manufacturer from California with an entrepreneurial bent. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church is gaining the funds it needs to retrieve and restore property lost during decades of neglect.

At the moment, bottled water isn't the phenomenon in Russia that it is elsewhere—percapita consumption in Poland is 20 times that of Russia. But that leaves plenty of room for growth; sales have been doubling almost every quarter. The specially designed "onion dome" plastic bottle is available on 90 percent of the international flights in and out of Moscow, most of the big hotels, some Moscow kiosks, and, if you look hard enough, in Siberia, too.

King gave the Russian church a liquid asset.