Hi-tech Bottling Comes to Remote Armenian Mountains

Sheikh Mohammed Mussallam has plenty of experience in running companies ranging from construction to telecommunications to the hotel A decorative gold overcap completes the bottles’ elegant look.business. Back in the 1980s he’d managed a family-run operation for bottled drinking water. He thus began developing the ambitious notion of returning to this field of business, this time with a premium product he could market the world over: natural Armenian mineral and spring water from a firm known as A&M Rare.

As far back as 2012 Mussallam contacted the Armenian government, which led him to a number of extremely cooperative individuals in the ministries of the environment and mining. He eventually found what he was looking for in Artavaz in the Kotayk Province in the Pambak Mountains. Here are two springs fed by rare mineral water coming from Anapak Mountain. Following extensive research and analysis, the high quality of this water has been certified by several recognized organizations for a period of five years. These include Geotest in Switzerland, SGS Institut Fresenius in Germany, Zenith Global in Great Britain, and the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. It took Mussallam five years to purchase the full 1,700 hectares of land from the various owners of this sparsely populated stretch of Armenia—but he knew that this was where his bottling plant belonged.