New Management, Upgraded Infrastructure Position Snow Valley for Continued Growth

Snow Valley Mountain Spring Water, a distributor of bottled water in the Baltimore/Washington region, announced it is implementing key upgrades to its infrastructure to better serve its customer base, which has swelled to record levels in 2001. Among the enhancements are a new core senior management team, a new distribution facility in Northern Virginia and a technologically advanced customer relationship management system including a call center.

In the past four years, Snow Valley has increased its revenues by 28 percent--surpassing the annual industry average in its market segment. In he past nine years alone, Snow Valley has more than double in size, growing from 16 team members to nearly 80 team members today. New management includes Anita Ridgell to manage its call center operation, Dave Nagle as general manager and Patrick McAndrew as sales manager.

Snow Valley expects to leverage its growing visibility and name recognition, along with its infrastructure improvements to increase its sales by 40 percent during the next two years. With only 40 percent of the 440,000 businesses in the Baltimore/Washington region now receiving bottled water service, there are many prospects for Snow Valley to target. Similarly, only 7 percent of the households in the region receive bottled water service.

Snow Valley's growth comes at a time when non-carbonated bottled water is America's fastest-growing beverage category with a total volume up approximately 28 percent in 2000. Bottled water enjoys annual sales of more than $5 billion a year in the United States alone, and quickly has grown to one-tenth the size of the well-established soft drink industry.

"Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of drinking water to maintaining good health and peak personal performance," said John LaPides, president of Snow Valley. "Combined with bottled water's strong basic fundamentals--quality, convenience and affordability--we don't foresee a slowdown in the growth of our industry or our brand."

The company also expects to build its customer service with a new automated call distribution (ACD) system at its headquarters. The ACD will reduce customer response times to less than 30 seconds and increase the number of calls fielded by customer service representatives.

In addition, to meet increasing consumer demand in the burgeoning Northern Virginia market, Snow Valley recently opened a new water distribution facility in Manassas, Va. To increase efficiency, the company also plans to implement technologically advanced robotic automation within the next six months at its bottling facility and main distribution center in Upper Marlboro, Md.

Source: Snow Valley Mountain Spring Water