How this Kentucky company started a bottled water market from a Wilmore spring

Today Highbridge Springs Water, with its pink and blue label, is well-known to Kentuckians. But 40 years ago, even the idea of bottled water was unfamiliar.

In 1982, when W.R. “Bill” Griffin bought an abandoned limestone quarry in Wilmore, bottled water barely existed in the U.S., let alone in Kentucky.

Griffin intended to develop a storage company for nonfat dry milk in the quarry next to High Bridge on the Kentucky River. Unfortunately, the quarry had an underground spring.

So when Griffin suggested that the family should bottle the water, his daughters weren’t sure if he was serious.

“We thought he was crazy,” said Linda Griffin, the company’s current president.

At the time, Linda Griffin said, there was not a bottle of drinking water in a grocery store in Central or Southeastern Kentucky.

There was just no market for such a product, that is until the family created one in Kentucky. A product that has grown — they bottle 25,000 gallons of water a day — despite big names like Coke and Pepsi later entering the bottled water market.

How Highbridge Springs went from storage to bottling water

The story goes that the Griffin family had an engineer venture from Kansas City, Kan., to discuss controlling humidity within the quarry, particularly in times like the summer when temperatures are hotter outside than in.

The engineer told Griffin that he’d have to control the water coming into the quarry from a spring.

“The quarry had blasted into an underground aquifer, and their solution was to just blast a drainage ditch,” said Linda Griffin. “For years, the water just flowed outside, but as we wanted to develop the storage company, that became a potential issue if the creek overflowed and came into the area we wanted to develop as a storage company.”

That’s when her father floated the idea of bottling the water.

He went to a bottled water convention and met people within the industry. He purchased bottling equipment and learned where to buy bottles and caps.

For the first several years, the family, including Bill Griffin and his daughters, handled all aspects including sales, bottling and delivery.

“We just started from the ground up. We had a little four-head gallon filler, and my dad, myself, my sister and my mother bottled the gallons,” Griffin said.

Griffin said her dad would send the sisters out in a pickup truck and tell the girls not to return until they sold all the water.

At the time, you could walk into a grocery store and ask if they would like to buy some water, and if they agreed, she and her sister could go and put the water on a shelf, Griffin said.

“We had a pricing gun. You actually put the price on the bottles, so there was none of the computerized checkout or inventory. You just put it on the shelf and, you know, off you went,” she said. “So that’s how we started in the early ‘80’s, just from ground zero.”

Highbridge Springs Water continues to grow

Today Highbridge Springs Water is still based outside of Wilmore and owned by the Griffin sisters with Linda Griffin serving as the company’s president since 1985.

Since 2008, Griffin also has served as the president of Kentucky Underground Storage. After they figured out what to do with the water, the former quarry made an excellent storage site.

The quarry, still massive in size and an astonishing site to see with its 32 open acres, 5.3 miles of corridors and 30-foot ceilings, houses both Highbridge Springs Water and Kentucky Underground Storage.

The family implemented changes as the years passed, such as installing a bigger filler and hiring more employees.

“We would go out and find what we needed and install it,” she said. “We just developed as the business grew.”

With the company tuning 40 years old this year, it has gone through big changes since its start.

Griffin said one the greatest changes was the advent of personal computers. Before their arrival in the 1980s, she said, everything related to the business was handwritten and hand-invoiced.

Griffin said other changes include improvements in equipment.

“You know, we started out doing it by hand totally ... to now a self-contained unit that washes the bottles as it goes through, comes around the line and fills them,” Griffin said. “We do in an hour now what we did all day, (what) took us eight hours to do in the beginning.”

Highbridge Springs has served both the Kentucky and Southeast communities by supplying drinking water during natural disasters such as hurricanes, brownouts and ice storms, Griffin said.

“When we first started bottled water, the bottled water industry was very regional. You had regional companies,” Griffin said. “So, when there were disasters, we were instrumental in helping in hurricanes as far away as Florida and South Carolina.”

Private labels on water bottles

Now that Coke and Pepsi are part of the bottled water market, Griffin said her company had to figure out a new angle. .

“When they got (into) the bottled water industry in the mid 1990’s, we knew right away that our small bottle sizes were not going to be competitive,” Griffin said. “So, we actually got into another area. It’s our custom label market.”

Griffin said Highbridge Springs produces smaller runs of custom labels for various companies including Toyota, Central Bank and Keeneland on their half-liter or 12-ounce bottles..

About Highbridge Springs Water

Highbridge Springs Water is produced by the natural filtering of limestone and reverse osmosis, a water purification process, according to their website.

The spring produces 60,000 gallons of water a day and 25,000 of them are bottled. In the forty years since its discovery, the spring that produces the company’s water has never run dry.

Highbridge Springs Water is on sale in stores including Kroger and Meijer and is available in eight states. They also delivers their five-gallon bottles throughout central southeastern Kentucky, off of their own trucks.

The name comes from nearby High Bridge, once the highest railroad bridge over a navigable stream in the U.S. The landmark bridge, built by John Roebling (who also designed the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the Roebling Suspension Bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati), was dedicated in 1879.