JUST Beverages says Whole Foods will sell its water

By Gordon Woodworth, Chronicle News Editor

Glens Falls start-up JUST Beverages announced on Twitter that Whole Foods will sell the water it is drawing from beneath the City of Glens Falls watershed on the mountains of Queensbury.

“JUST Water is 100% spring water. Nothing added. Coming soon to Whole Foods for 99 cents a carton,” JUST tweeted last week.

That tweet had been removed by Monday of this week.

JUST has been mum about its immediate sales plans while it awaits approval from the state Department of Health to start marketing its product.

JUST Chief Operating Officer Jim Siplon had not returned several requests for comment by press time.

Mr. Siplon has refused to identify JUST’s prospective customers, or to release images of the company’s recyclable “packaging.”

It said in mid-May that retail customers will “control the roll-out,” and that JUST has “national contracts which we will be fulfilling.”

Mr. Siplon had expressed hope they’d be packaging water by the end of May at its plant in the former St. Alphonsus Church on Broad Street. He said the company was in the “final stages of the process with the State Department of Health.”

Last week, the Post-Star said Mr. Siplon told them that the New York State Department of Health won’t let JUST show what its packaging will look like or market the water until it final approvals are received.

JUST’s Twitter account was created on May 26 and has 12 followers, at last look.

The Twitter account includes two color photos of JUST’s packaging, which company officials said will be made out of “primarily renewable natural materials to encourage recycling.”

In May, Mr. Siplon said that once the company receives the go-ahead, “we are prepared to ramp up to full-time production status, which would be eight hours a day, about 9,000 cases of 12 per hour.”

Restrictions on truck traffic to the packaging plant will limit production there, Mr. Siplon admitted. “As we grow, we will explore having a facility near Exit 18. We will honor those [traffic] limits.”

In settling a lawsuit brought by neighboring developer Tom O’Neill, JUST agreed to a deed covenant which stipulates that no more than 10 tractor trailers will use New Pruyn Street per week, and water trucks will be limited to 16 round-trips per day down Broad Street.

The Queensbury Planning Board, in giving its conditional approval of the water-extraction plan, limits the truck traffic to six round trips per day for the first year, and up to six per day on weekends.

JUST is paying Glens Falls $5,000 a month for the right to extract 1 million gallons of water a year. After that, the company will pay a penny a gallon, which City officials have said is up to six times the rate Glens Falls residents pay.

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