We put bottled water to a taste test

We’ve wondered if there really is a different taste among brands of water. So we performed an experiment.

We gave five students five of the most popular brands of water to try without them knowing which water was which. The brands we used were Poland Spring, Fiji Artesian Water, Voss, Evian and Dasani.

We gave the students a set of cups labeled one to five, each one filled with a different brand of water, and asked them to rank the waters, from best-tasting to worst-tasting. To make it more fun, we asked them to guess which brand they were drinking. The results we got were very interesting.

Based on our results, Poland Spring won first place for the brand that tasted the best.

Three out of five kids chose Poland Spring as their favorite and three out of five chose Fiji as the next best, putting Fiji in second place. A majority of the students put Evian in third place followed by Dasani in fourth place. Voss’s ranking was difficult to determine as it was ranked differently on each person’s list, spanning the entire range from best to worst.

In conclusion, we were very surprised with our results. Aside from the superior packaging of these waters, Alok and I personally favored Fiji and Voss and hypothesized that they would be the top two winners. We felt that both had the freshest and cleanest taste overall.

We were quite surprised at how good the students were at identifying which brand corresponded to each blind water sample. One student correctly matched all of the samples with the right brand names.

Overall, this was such a fun experiment. It would be even more interesting to get a larger group to take this challenge and see if our results still hold true. Poland Spring was our clear and refreshing winner!

Marytheresa Donohue’s seventh-grade class, St. Mary School, East Islip