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Entrepreneurs: Meet One Water, a drinks brand with ethical credentials

Entrepreneurs: Duncan Goose is the founder of ethical drinks company One: Matt Writtle
Entrepreneurs: Duncan Goose is the founder of ethical drinks company One: Matt Writtle

In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest tropical cyclones on record, ripped through the Atlantic coast, destroying villages and killing thousands. Duncan Goose, founder of ethical drinks company One, saw the devastation first hand.

Inspired by Ted Simon’s famed travelogue Jupiter’s Travels, the 30-year-old marketing chief was travelling along the Mosquito Coast in Honduras during a two-year round-the-world motorbike adventure when disaster struck.

“I went down to a local village and there was a house that had been filled with a liquid mud,” he says, sitting in his sunlit Richmond office. “I picked up a roof tile and started digging it out. Everyone looked at me like I was bonkers but then everyone else picked up roof tiles. By the end of the day, we’d dug a house out.”

Goose, now 48, says the expedition and experience of “living under the helicopter” — he survived eating grapefruit after food ran out during the disaster — was pivotal in his creation of One Water, which is stocked in Starbucks, City boardrooms and restaurants like Hawksmoor. “The reason it’s called One is because you can’t change a billion people’s lives but if you can change one, that’s a definition of success,” he says.

Britain’s bottled-water market is a competitive place — 22 million drink it and the market expanded 10.6% last year — but One’s ethical credentials make it stand out from the crowd.

“If you put two bottles side by side and they were roughly the same in price and aesthetics but one will make money for shareholders and one will save some kid’s life, which one are you going to go for?” Goose says.

The premise is simple: a donation is made from each case sold to the One Foundation to invest in water projects around the world.

The company has handed over £15 million since it started, for tasks like training engineers in Africa to fix vital village water pumps, and has set an ambitious target to donate £20 million by 2020. A new range of botanical drinks called Origins launches in July and it has also rolled out its first gin, made with sage collected from the Sussex Downs, to tap into the growing craze for bespoke booze.

The former marketing man got the idea for the company in the pub on Grand National day in 2003. One of his marketing mates told him there were one billion people in the world without access to clean drinking water, a startling fact that prompted him into action.

Goose, whose sister is Casualty actress Claire Goose, started plotting a new bottled water company to solve the problem, and a few years later quit his job at marketeer J Walter Thompson.

He remortgaged his Teddington flat and started the first big production run of 12,000 bottles in June 2005, on the same day that Live 8 launched. He wrote a pitch in the evening, and the next day drove to Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis’s London offices, trying to clinch a deal to make One the official water for the charitable concert. He blagged his way in and won the contract.

“We were globally televised in the hands of Brad Pitt, and U2 were playing One Love,” he says with a grin.

Months of graft followed but contracts were few and far between.

One wet Friday in October, he met the regional manager of Total petrol stations and got a breakthrough. “He said ‘we think this is a great idea and we’d like to support it’. Somebody believed in it. That’s all it took really.”

The company grew quickly, boasting a board stocked with execs from the likes of RBS and Red Bull. Then the recession hit and Goose nearly lost everything. Top stockists Co-op, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose took cover and ended their contracts, forcing the company to shrink from 25 people to just three. “It was awful,” he admits. “I knew it was horrible for us but there were people out there having a much worse time than I was.”

Nine years on and it is back on its feet.

The Foundation is pushing into more sustainable projects, including solar pumps and deep water extraction in places like Kenya and Rwanda.

Goose wants to retire in 2030 when he’s 62 and the water crisis is over — “an audacious goal”, he admits.

“When I started, I said the problem will never be solved in my lifetime but I’m going for it now. There’s still 663 million people in the world that don’t have access to clean water. I want to see that problem eradicated.” Let’s drink to that.