Starbucks ONE Water 750ml Still

ONE Water 750ml Still costs £3.00 at Starbucks UK and carries 0 calories, no sugar and no salt. It is British spring water in a bottle made from recycled plastic, and it is the largest bottle Starbucks sells.

Size is the whole argument for this one. The 750ml bottle is 50 percent more water than the 500ml for about 40p more, which makes it the cheapest water per litre on the menu by a clear margin. Anyone buying water to take away rather than to drink at the table is paying less per mouthful here than in any other format in the fridge.

Price moves more than most items on the board, from £3.00 up to £4.05 depending on the delivery platform and the store. That spread is wider in percentage terms than the spread on a Grande Latte, which is worth knowing before ordering water through an app rather than carrying it to the till.

Worth saying plainly: every Starbucks store in the UK will give you tap water free if you ask, and will fill a bottle you have brought with you. The bottled product is for the sealed cap and the ability to put it in a bag, not for anything the tap does not do. That is a fair trade at a station or an airport and a poor one when you are sitting in the store.

Spring water is worth a word, since the term is regulated rather than decorative. It has to come from a single protected underground source and be bottled at that source, without the treatment tap water goes through. That does not make it better for you, and the UK tap supply is held to standards just as strict. It does mean the mineral character is consistent from bottle to bottle, which is the only sense in which one water tastes different from another.

The bottle is 100 percent recycled plastic and fully recyclable, though the cap and label are excluded from that figure. Nothing here is gluten containing and the drink suits vegan and vegetarian diets. The 500ml still is the smaller format at £2.55, and the 500ml sparkling is the carbonated version at the same price.