A Perthshire village at the foot of the Ochils.

Highland Spring is a Scottish bottled-water company based in Blackford, a village in Perth and Kinross. English Wikipedia, citing The Courier of Dundee, says the company was incorporated in 1979 and bottled its first product in 1980; BBC News, reporting in November 2009, described the business as 30 years old. It makes still, sparkling and flavoured water at its factory in Blackford, and English Wikipedia gives its line as “Water As Nature Intended.”

The company’s ownership has been stable for decades. BBC News reported in 2009 that Highland Spring was owned by the Dubai-based Al Tajir family, and English Wikipedia, citing coverage of the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List, names the owner as the Emirati-born businessman Mahdi Al Tajir, whom it describes as the first ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United Kingdom. The company presents itself today as Highland Spring Group, with Highland Spring Limited named in the copyright line of its websites.

Its water comes from the Ochil Hills. The company says it draws from 2,500 acres of its own land there, which it describes as organic and keeps free of farming, pesticides and housing. The Courier reported in August 2024 that the water is drawn through boreholes up to 150 metres deep, and the company says rain takes about 15 years to pass down through layers of Old Red Sandstone and basalt before it is drawn. The company says it takes just over 3% of the rain that falls on its land; its managing director gave The Courier a figure of around 3% in the same interview.

The name needs one footnote. English Wikipedia points out that, despite the name, Blackford lies outside the traditional boundaries of the Scottish Highlands.

Recycled bottles, a railhead and new flavours.

Most of Highland Spring’s recent news has been about packaging and transport rather than about the water itself. In June 2018, BBC News reported that the company would become the first UK water brand to introduce a bottle made from 100% recycled plastic. The trial used a 500-millilitre “eco bottle,” sold in selected supermarkets in Scotland and England, labelled so that shoppers could tell it apart and invited to give feedback. BBC News noted that bottles made from recycled plastic look cloudier and greyer than new ones. The chief executive at the time, Les Montgomery, told the BBC that “plastic is a valuable resource that shouldn’t be treated as waste.” English Wikipedia dates the full launch of the recycled bottle to January 2019.

In 2017, English Wikipedia says, citing the Sunday Post, a new production building at Blackford was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II. Five years later the company added a rail freight terminal beside its headquarters: English Wikipedia, citing STV, says it opened in August 2022 and was fully working by January 2023. The Courier reported in 2024 that about 500,000 litres leave the site by train six days a week, and that the company says the railhead has taken thousands of lorry journeys off the roads.

The range has widened too. In 2024 Highland Spring launched a flavoured still water range, first in Tesco stores, The Courier reported; its managing director Simon Oldham, who became sole managing director in the summer of 2023, called flavoured water a market the company had never competed in before. The company’s own range now lists still, sparkling, flavoured, glass and boxed water, as well as a 100% recycled bottle.

The company has also set itself climate targets, which it states rather than documents: The Courier reported that it aims for net zero by 2040 and plans a solar farm across the A9 from the Blackford plant. Internally, the newspaper reported, the company prefers the term “natural source water” to “bottled water.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all bottled water names: Acqua Panna, Highland Spring, smartwater, San Benedetto, Poland Spring, Essentia and Buxton. Bottled water brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still run their own springs to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant table.

A bottled water brand’s identity is usually carried less by the water itself than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, added new sources or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its water is actually sourced and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its water is sourced and bottled and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family-owned rival to the multinationals.

Highland Spring has grown by buying as well as by building. In November 2009, BBC News reported, it bought the bottled-water division of the Dublin food group Greencore, which made own-label water for supermarkets at the Campsie Spring plant in Lennoxtown, north of Glasgow, and at Blaen Twyni in Wales. The BBC said the deal made Highland Spring the UK’s largest bottled-water company at the time, with five plants and 12 production lines, and that Greencore’s workforce would transfer to the new owner. Les Montgomery, then chief executive, called it “a major milestone in the history of Highland Spring.” English Wikipedia dates the Lennoxtown acquisition to 2010 and says the site produces private-label water for supermarkets.

That split matters for anyone reading the brand. The Highland Spring name is reserved for water from Blackford: The Courier reported in 2024 that the company employed 350 people at Blackford, “where all Highland Spring branded products are produced,” while the Lennoxtown site makes water sold under retailers’ own labels. The company competes with brands owned by global groups such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé, and Simon Oldham told The Courier that one key to growing was “not to act like” a bigger business.

English Wikipedia, citing the company’s filings at Companies House, says it sold 404.1 million litres of Highland Spring-branded water in the United Kingdom in 2023.

For a design guide, Highland Spring shows how a water brand can build its identity on a named landscape and on what it does with its bottles and lorries, while staying family-owned through more than four decades. Compare Buxton, an English spring water from the Peak District, and Ramlösa, a Swedish water from a spa town. For this guide we use loch blue, hill mist and Ochil green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Highland Spring’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.