Up North Progressive

If you didn’t hear the news from last week Ice Mountain and all of the other bottled water companies owned by Nestlé will be sold to One Rock Capital Partners for $4.3 billion. The private equity firm will partner with Dean Metropoulos to complete the sale, then Metropoulos will become the CEO.

NWNA hasn’t been doing so well in recent years. People are fed up with the company’s attitude toward water being a commodity and plastic bottles choking landfills. The people living near the behemoth bottling plant in Evart and the pumping stations scattered all over Osceola and Mecosta counties sucking the aquifers dry would love nothing more than to see Ice Mountain dry up and blow away.

NWNA came to Michigan after Wisconsin wisely told them to take a hike. Michigan, unfortunately, has an easily exploitable policy about resource extraction that only requires a $200 fee. Nestlé paid this fee and not a penny more. It sucks 200 gallons every minute from the Muskegon River watershed making billions in profit; none of which the state of Michigan benefits from.

In 2000, only a few years after NWNA began draining Osceola county, local conservationists already found trout streams in the area were draining away to the point trout no longer swam in them. The region of Michigan NWNA planted their massive plant is world-famous for trout fishing. Local communities hold annual festivals and celebrate trout fishing with massive sculptures and economies that rely on people traveling to fish.

Nestlé’s response to this was to hire their own monitoring firm and insisted no such thing was happening.

In 2017, Nestlé began work on a new, larger capacity pumping station and applied for a permit to double the amount of water they took out of the ground every minute of every day. This led to massive public outcry and public hearings. MDEQ, now EGLE, ignored the overwhelming demands that Nestlé be denied the increase and granted the permit anyway. Litigation with Osceola Township put more roadblocks in NWNA’s way and the company began their search for a buyer.

One Rock Capital Partners is an unknown. Dean Metropoulos has a history of taking floundering businesses and making them profitable again. His portfolio includes Hostess Snack Cakes and Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.

What the sale of Ice Mountain and all of the other cheap bottled water brands in North America will mean for those of us living in the shadow of Nestlé Waters’ never-ending thirst for free Michigan water is unknown. Businesses purchased by private equity firms tend to shrink labor and focus on making money over making businesses financially healthy. Leveraged buyouts mean for many companies there are optimistically 10 years left before going out of business. More layoffs, more people in rural Michigan out of work.

What happens next with One Rock Capital Partners taking over Ice Mountain remains to be seen.