Small Business Gold Mine in Water

In recent years, many water entrepreneurs have seen fat payoffs. Major corporations interested in building water businesses have been spending lavishly to acquire new products.

For example, in March 2006, General Electric bought water-filtration company Zenon Environmental Inc. of Ontario, Canada, for $656 million. At the private-investor fund Summit Water Equity Fund LP in San Diego, managing general partner John Dickerson likens the water industry of today to the oil industry in the 1920s -- in other words, it's a ground-floor opportunity. He notes that water is the only product people can't live without, and for which there is no substitute.

One new water product his fund invests in is Ice Rocks, a high-end spring-water ice cube line made by Miami-based Water Bank of America Inc. Dickerson expects the ice cubes to capture a niche in the luxury end of the American bottled water market -- which Beverage Marketing Corp. estimated at $9.8 billion in 2005.

"I think [they] will become expected in first-class hotels and restaurants," Dickerson says of Ice Rocks. "They'll give them to you in the case, and you'll pop them in your glass." Water Bank was founded in 2002 by three Canadian brothers, Michel Pelletier, 41, Jean-Jean Pelletier, 37, and Robert Pelletier, 34, who've raised over $6 million to fund their efforts. Water Bank purchased the Ice Rocks company from a French firm in 2004.