Businesses, State Launch Buy-Utah Campaign

Utah’s Mount Olympus Waters Inc. once enjoyed a flood of retail customers eager to peddle its small bottles of mineral refreshment.

BY LESLEY MITCHELL
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Today, many of those customers have evaporated.
"We can’t sell any of our small bottles of water at the University of Utah or Utah State University, for example, because they have contracted with Coca-Cola, which sells water under the brand name Dasani," said Jim Ure of Mount Olympus.

"Most of the high schools in Utah have contracted exclusively with either Coke or Pepsi, which has its own brand, Aquafina, so we can’t sell our small bottles there either," he added.
A new state-funded initiative aims to help Utah food and beverage producers such as Mount Olympus cope with an increasingly competitive marketplace dominated by large international companies.

"A lot of Utah products are simply being pushed off the shelves," said Richard Sparks, marketing specialist for the state Agriculture Department.
Sparks is an adviser to the Utah Food Strategy Team, a new volunteer partnership of farmers and community leaders created to help devise ways to help Utah producers succeed.

The group on Wednesday unveiled a new logo, "Utah’s Own," that will be used in stores and in public service announcements in multiple media formats to promote Utah-made products. It also presented other ways it plans to raise awareness of Utah companies, such as making available Utah-grown or produced foods to all state government agencies that purchase foods.

Sparks acknowledges there are limits to what the team can accomplish. For starters, it has received only $55,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and $20,000 from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. Big companies spend millions to market their products.

But producers such as Mount Olympus are hopeful.
Mount Olympus is still angry because of a recent ironic twist — being excluded from selling its bottled water at the Utah State Fair’s "Utah Store," an outlet devoted to products made in the state. The fair’s exclusive contract with Pepsi prevented it from taking part.

"Our business has really been pounded hard and so have all the other Utah businesses who have attempted to compete with these international companies with deep pockets," Ure said. " The potential is there for this team to really help Utah products if they can create a consciousness with the Utah consumer.

"I am hopeful they are able to communicate the fact to people in Utah that there are some great benefits to buying products made in the state — that you keep your money in Utah and help preserve Utah jobs," he said.

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http://www.sltrib.com/2002/Dec/12192002/business/business.asp