Ice Age-Era Water Taps Mother Nature for Product, Packaging

Ice Age Water Ltd. of Heinola, Finland, sells its unique natural mineral water sourced from the last Ice Age under the Vellamo brand. With the product awash in sustainability—the 10,000-year-old glacier water adheres to the strict standards required for an official seal of approval, is bottled at the source, and contains no environmental pollution or added minerals or sweeteners—Ice Age Water wanted nothing less for its packaging.

“Vellamo is one of Mother Nature’s perfect creations,” says Ice Age Water CEO Petteri Ahonen. “We have taken great measures to ensure our unique taste, purity, and sustainability for the health of our customers and planet by achieving a carbon-neutral footprint across production, packaging, and logistics.”

Vellamo, its name pronounced “vel-emo” and originating from the goddess spirit of water in Finnish mythology, uses packaging that conjures the water’s origins while using materials—glass and wood—that come from equally natural sources. The Scandinavian-design glass bottle is sculpted to look like a block of ice, with a crisp blue color that invokes the blue of the glaciers from which the water is sourced. According to the company, “The flowing water element from the top to the bottom tells how the water ran through the glacier all the way to the Nordic soil. When you place Vellamo face down on her side, you can find the canyon, her home.”

Read how other water bottlers are addressing sustainable packaging in these related articles from Packaging World:

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The label material used for the bottle is where innovation really comes into play though. The material, Forest Film PP™ from UPM Raflatac, is “the world’s first and only” polypropylene plastic label material, says the supplier. Forest Film PP is constructed from UPM BioVerno naphtha, a 100% wood-based solution made from crude tall oil, a residue of the pulp production process originating from sustainably-managed forests. According to UPM Raflatac, the label material has the same quality and properties as traditional PP labels.

The label offers another aspect of transparency as well. It features UPM Raflatac’s RafMore, a smart label solution that allows consumers to scan the label unique to every Vellamo bottle to access real-time product lifecycle and carbon footprint data.

Vellamo is available in 50- and 75-mL bottles in the U.S., where it launched in February 2020, as well as in Finland and Canada.

Watch a video on Vellamo and its packaging.