Josh White didn’t see himself as a future headline act when he went on a lads’ holiday with two fellow 22-year-old childhood friends to Thailand in 2014, the trio having left with plastic pollution memories over island-hopping beauty.

“We had no future planned out for us,” says White, co-founder of start-up Cano Water. “We didn’t realise that our calling was to change the whole drinks industry to go from plastic to cans. We weren’t meant to be entrepreneurs. I got kicked out of school and now I am like the poster boy for every newspaper that comes out.”

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White was a DJ a decade ago, while his soon-to-be business partners and co-founders, Ariel Booker and Perry Fielding, worked in recruitment and design. “Where we grew up in Hertfordshire you don’t see plastic pollution,” says White. “But Brits do care about this and we are one of the only nations to go out of our way to talk about it.”

After returning to the UK, they would meet up every night after work and discovered, through research, that aluminum was the world's most recycled material, whereas plastic needed more production.

“We suffer from ADHD and we became obsessed with the issue and why it was happening," says White. "The brands we grew up loving, the Evians and Coca-Colas (KO), these places [like Thailand] were getting ruined and these companies were getting away from it.”

The brand was launched in 2015 as the world’s first canned water. “If we were in the drinks industry, we would have looked at it and gone: it wouldn’t work, it’s more expensive than plastic, who will buy a can, it will taste metallic, you can’t close a can or see the water,” admits White. “That’s why it had never been done before.

“Even my family called me into our lounge and saw it as a strange idea. But we were all under the impression that we could convince people.”

The next four years, says White, were the hardest of the co-founders’ lives, even after they had launched into Selfridges and at London Fashion Week in 2016. They had all left their jobs, with aspirations that their business would be an instant success.

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“It was at a time where profit came before purpose,” says White. “No one was talking about plastic pollution so why would people change their habits?”

The trio made hundreds of weekly calls to make a further breakthrough, despite backing from a Selfridges’ shareholder who cared about plastic pollution. “We had days where we went home crying as we had given up everything,” adds White.

Cano Water, which posted £5m in revenue last year, gave themselves three months to stave off bankruptcy and closing the business. Then, in their last month, a Blue Planet programme on the BBC centred on plastic pollution and a whale dying.

“I had around 50 messages from friends asking if I had seen the programme,” recalls White. “Overnight we went from being one of the UK’s biggest fads to closing in three weeks; to selling a few hundred thousand cans in four years to 12 million cans in 2019. David Attenborough was the saviour of the business.”

Having originally sourced its water from a spring in the Austrian Alps, this year Cano Water moved its production to the UK and halved the firm’s carbon footprint. “It’s been one of the biggest challenges of the last 10 years as no one would put water in cans originally,” says White. “No one wanted to take the risk as you need big minimum order quantities.”

White and Cano Water’s operations director travelled the UK looking for the best quality water and fell upon a spring at an undisclosed location in Yorkshire. “We’ve got some really good quality water in the UK and quality for a premium brand like ours is our number one priority,” adds White.

It has been a long path to the spring for White, who has suffered from ADHD since he was 10 and was put on medication, while he also battled alcoholism and relapses in his teens. “When I was diagnosed, I was seen as an outcast,” he says. “For years I didn’t speak about it and attribute a lot of my success and my addictive personality to my ADHD mind.”

Having not drunk alcohol for many years, White’s friends now call him "the water guy". “I know my water,” he smiles. “It’s about the smoothness and you don’t want any after taste. When people drink water out of a can they need to have a good experience and I don’t believe there is a metallic taste in cans.”

Cano Water, which also uses resealable lids, now counts the likes of comedian Ricky Gervais as one of several high-profile backers alongside partners such as Virgin Atlantic.

“Change is happening but we need more cans on the market as it helps us,” admits White. “The world will be predominately cans in the next 10 years. It’s about the shift and putting purpose before profit."

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Rather than campaigning on the issue, White says that Cano is about making noise and being heard, coupled with stunts such as last year’s stance against Wimbledon’s partnership with Evian and highlighting the impact of single-use plastic. Meanwhile, their disruptive stance is summed up with ‘Don’t bottle it’ written on every can.

“Our vision was to scare a lot of these companies into action. Coke and Pepsi (PEP) are now putting water into cans, Evian has a sparkling can in the UK,” says White.

“One of my proudest things ever is that I can turn round to my kids and say the reason drinks are now in cans and not in plastic bottles is that we did something about it.”

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