Nestlé Exposed Extracting Water From Canadian Towns on Expired Permits — and How Residents Pushed Them Out

Nestlé, long the largest bottled-water producer in the world, was exposed for drawing groundwater from Canadian towns on permits that had already expired. The situation outraged residents and environmentalists, who accused the Ontario government of letting Nestlé continue to profit off a shared public resource while generating enormous volumes of single-use plastic waste.

Nestlé defended itself by pointing to the tens of thousands of dollars it donated to the towns hosting its wells and bottling plants, and it blamed the Ontario government for making what it called “complicated changes” to water-management rules. The company said it was amending its Permit to Take Water applications to comply with the new technical requirements.

This was not the first time the company had operated this way. Nestlé had a documented history of bottling water on expired permits, most notably in drought-stricken California, where as of 2015 it had been extracting water from the San Bernardino National Forest on a permit that had lapsed 27 years earlier.

In Ontario, meanwhile, the company was pumping millions of litres of groundwater every day from wells near the towns of Aberfoyle (in Puslinch) and Erin — its Aberfoyle plant alone was permitted to take up to 3.6 million litres a day — frequently faster than local aquifers could recharge.

“Although Nestlé’s Aberfoyle and Erin permits have expired, they are deemed to stay in force, and operations can continue until the ministry makes a decision on the renewal application,” Gary Wheeler, an Ontario government spokesperson, told VICE News.

Sand River, Ontario, Canada

The friction in Wellington County had been building for years. A local hydrogeologist working with the grassroots group Wellington Water Watchers reported that the Guelph-area aquifer had dropped roughly 1.5 metres between 2011 and 2015 — a stretch during which Nestlé increased its pumping by about a third — and the controversy boiled over in the drought summer of 2016, when Guelph residents faced fines for watering their lawns while the bottling line kept running. Residents demanded that the government impose higher levies on large extractors and do far more to protect natural resources, warning that demand for water was climbing alongside population growth.

“It’s a classic conflict of the demands of the few outweighing the demands of the many,” said Mike Nagy, an activist and consultant with Wellington Water Watchers.

In response to the public pressure, the province moved to hold large bottlers more accountable. In 2016 Ontario sharply raised the fee corporations pay to extract groundwater — from less than $4 per million litres to $503.71 per million litres — and imposed a moratorium on new and expanded water-bottling permits, a freeze that was repeatedly extended in the years that followed.

Gary Wheeler said the higher charge was “expected to recover a significant portion of the province’s costs of managing groundwater taken by water bottlers, including supporting scientific research, policies, outreach and compliance.”

Crystal Falls, Ontario, Canada

Nestlé Walks Away From Canada

The sustained community resistance ultimately paid off. In July 2020, Nestlé announced it would exit the Canadian bottled-water business entirely, saying it wanted to focus on premium international brands such as San Pellegrino, Perrier, and Acqua Panna. Its first attempt to sell the Pure Life operation — including the Aberfoyle plant, the Erin well, and the contested Middlebrook well it had bought near Elora in 2016 over fierce local opposition — was to the Ontario company Ice River Springs, but that deal collapsed in September 2020 when it failed to clear the Competition Bureau in time.

Instead, in February 2021, Nestlé sold its entire North American water business — Nestlé Waters North America, encompassing Pure Life, Poland Spring, Deer Park, and Ice Mountain — to the private-equity firm One Rock Capital Partners for roughly $4.3 billion. The new owner rebranded the operation as BlueTriton. That ownership churn was far from over: BlueTriton announced in late 2024 that it would merge with Florida-based Primo Water and wind down its Ontario operations by the end of January 2025. The Aberfoyle and Erin properties and their water-taking permits then passed in 2025 to White Wolf Property Management, a Shelburne firm tied to the Gott family that also owns Ice River Springs, which paid more than $61 million for the former Nestlé site.

Water campaigners scored a more direct victory at the third, never-used well. After years of advocacy by Wellington Water Watchers and the Council of Canadians, the township of Centre Wellington purchased the Elora/Middlebrook well in April 2025 for a reported $1.8 million, returning it to public hands rather than leaving it available for future commercial bottling.

A clean, permanent resolution remains elusive — the renewed permits still authorize taking up to roughly 3.6 million litres a day at Aberfoyle and 1.1 million litres a day at Erin, and activists argue that bottling public groundwater for private profit is never sustainable regardless of which corporation holds the license. But the saga stands as a reminder of what organized residents can accomplish: a multinational that once pumped Ontario’s aquifers on lapsed permits has been pushed out of the country, and at least one well has been reclaimed for the communities that depend on it.