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I was pleased to be invited to the recent British Water Cooler Association General Meeting and to hear that all BWCA Distributor members now offer plumbed-in POU water coolers as well as bottled water coolers.

BWCA chair, Michael Barnett, commented that the realignment of businesses to ‘dual-service‘ had meant that members had been very successful in winning major supply contracts for both types of water coolers, and that the phrase “one industry, two solutions” provided clarity for customers who appreciated being given a choice.

All those years ago, when I was the editor of the world’s only bottled water cooler magazine, H2O Europe (and at the time we launched the first POU industry magazine, The Point), I recall that we seemed to constantly talk about the fact that the water cooler industry was a service industry and, for the sake of long-term viability – or sustainability, as we might call it now – the accent at all times had to be on maintaining the highest possible service standards to customers while providing solutions that best matched their particular needs.

Merging the two successful magazines to launch Cooler Innovation was an easy decision, as we have always maintained that customers see only “one industry, two solutions” and that to a client, “a cooler is a cooler”. Nice then to note that at least part of the industry has caught up with our way of thinking.

This article first appeared in Cooler Innovation magazine.