Watercooler, c. 1910

Water coolers have evolved from simply relying on a block of ice for cooling water for victorian households to highly technical machines meeting strict health, sanitation and environmental standards.

By the mid to late 1980’s entrepreneurs in the UK realised an opportunity to create a watercooler market in the UK, which helped to encourage people to increase their water intake.

Primarily, the watercoolers were bottle fed, and the industry was initially driven by the bottled water producing companies. The customers liked the perceived quality of water in a bottle. Without doubt the mineral water suppliers had a good case to make but some other bottled waters were sourced from the mains supply, filtered and bottled. This was and still is a very expensive way of buying filtered mains water!!

During the 1990’s, again led by America, there was a change in emphasis from bottled watercoolers to watercoolers that incorporated filters, cutting out the expensive costs of the bottling process, cost of bottles and the huge cost of delivery. This trend is now happening in the UK, with more and more mains fed watercoolers being supplied to both new watercooler users and existing bottled watercooler customers.