The Major Water Brand That Had To Recall Nearly 2 Million Bottles In 2024

You wouldn't think of bottled water as something that needs to be recalled often — there should ideally be only one ingredient, and it's water. In reality, there have been bottled water recalls that affected millions of people over the years. Those recalls don't ever include the microplastics you consume from plastic bottles, so what exactly can happen to bottled water that necessitates the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stepping in? One major example involves the more expensive Fiji water brand, which had to recall nearly two million bottles of water in early 2024 due to manganese.

According to the FDA report, there were 78,533 cases of Fiji water (each case containing 24 bottles) produced in late 2023, which may have been contaminated with "manganese in addition to three bacterial genera." The bacteria weren't specified in any more detail, but manganese is seemingly an odd reason for a recall because it's a naturally occurring mineral, which is considered healthy in small amounts. Tiny traces of it can be found in drinking water, but in larger amounts, it can cause neurological issues like memory loss or nervous system problems, and it can harm brain development in small children. Thankfully, it does take a large buildup of manganese to start causing damage.

So what went wrong? The FDA's official rule is that a liter of drinking water should never contain more than 0.05 milligrams of manganese, which water companies need to stay mindful of due to how often manganese shows up. In this case, testing of those 1.9 million bottles of Fiji water (or more likely, testing of a sample) had passed that threshold. The bottling company, Natural Waters of Viti Limited, based in Fiji, initiated the recall itself after testing revealed the contaminants, although it clarified at the time that there wasn't any immediate health risk to drinking a bottle of the recalled water. The FDA seemed to agree that the bacteria also posed no immediate risk. Still, consumers were encouraged to discard it at the time.

Fiji doesn't seem to have experienced any more major recalls in the years since, at the time of this writing, but bottled water recalls often involve dirty manufacturing conditions just as often as they involve genuine contaminants. A more recent recall of over 650,000 bottles of Valley Springs water involved evidence of the water being bottled in unsanitary conditions, while about 38,000 bottles of Meijer water were recalled for a black, foreign substance found floating inside. Is Fiji water still worth the money, or is it overpriced? That's up to you, but beyond that instance, it's not any more dangerous than other water brands.