POU predicted to overtake bottled water coolers in 2021

Last month, food and drink consultancy Zenith Global published its 2019 UK Water Dispense Market report. Here’re the highlights.

Despite poorer summer weather and increased business uncertainty over Brexit, the UK water dispense market grew by 2.3% in value to £192 million. The number of units installed grew by 2.9% to over 870,000.

Mains fed Point of Use dispensers (POU) grew steadily and now account for 24% of revenue and 38% of units. Interestingly, integrated tap systems also gained share to 17% of revenue and 22% of units. We’ve also seen increased interest in this area, particularly at Aquatech where we unveiled our new prototype tap systems.

According to the report, plastic is a growing challenge for the industry: “Refillability has become an important new feature of the dispense market over the last two years.” During 2019 we found that many end-users were looking for products that helped them reduce reliance on single-use plastics.

Zenith Global also predicts that POU will overtake Bottles Water Coolers (BWC) in 2021.

In our opinion there will always be a need for BWCs. However, with increased focus on protecting the environment we foresee increased pressure on the water dispense market to reduce the number being used. There’s still a considerable amount of BWCs being used where they could easily be replaced with POUs.

The report predicts continued growth for the UK water dispense market up to 950,000 units by 2024. However, the current coronavirus pandemic is a “big unknown for all current market predictions”. According to the report “most water dispense units are in places of work and that could lead to a dip in 2020 before growth resumes”.

You can read the full report on the Zenith Global website.