Consulting Services
Baytel has extensive experience exploring the markets for tap water, bulk bottled water, and home water treatment (and storage) products, as well as their consumables, worldwide. In addition to publishing its line of best-in-class market research and technology analysis reports, Baytel offers its unique expertise and research capabilities through confidential custom consulting services. Upholding consultant-client confidentiality is one of our core values.
Our clients have ranged from small technology-driven startups to some of the largest private equity firms and global suppliers of consumer products, beverages, chemicals, and household appliances. Projects are tailored to client needs — we do not use templates or boilerplate. Consulting projects are carried out by Baytel principals, each of whom has decades of experience in the field. We ask the tough questions and come up with real, actionable solutions. We can provide Board-Level presentations supporting your goals.
We need someone who really understands the business; someone with vision, creativity, experience, data, and insights.
Let’s call Baytel!
The following "mini case studies” sketch out just a few of the many types of projects Baytel has undertaken:
We have scouted and evaluated residential water treatment markets and business opportunities worldwide over the past 40 years. Clients have included 3M, A.O. Smith, Advent International, Amway, Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Brita GmbH, ChungHo, Clorox, Coway, Culligan, Dow Chemical, Electrolux, Elkay, In-Sink-Erator, Kimberly-Clark, Mitsubishi, Monsanto, P&G, Philips, Rohm and Haas, Rubbermaid Commercial, Teledyne Water Pik, Toray, Unilever, Vorwerk, Whirlpool, and numerous others. Click here for client testimonials
Baytel has explored competitors’ product types, features & pricing in various markets for clients like Strauss Water (JV with Haier, which acquired GE Appliances), Unilever Ventures, Toto, and others.
Baytel has attended the relevant industry trade shows, conferences and symposia for decades. For example, already back in 1992 a large group of Japanese and Korean companies invited three experts to make presentations at the First International Symposium on the Markets for Drinking Water Treatment Units held in Osaka and Tokyo. Along with Dr. Joseph Cotruvo (Director of USEPA’s Drinking Water Standards Division) and Nancy Culotta (General Manager, Drinking Water Treatment Units, Certification Program, NSF International), Baytel’s Matt Moes, was invited as the acknowledged global expert covering the markets for home water treatment.
After researching and publishing a highly acclaimed 2-volume report "The U.S. Home Drinking Water Treatment Market" in the early 1990s, Baytel's principals were sent on their first international research trips by Teledyne Waterpik’s CEO, Wayne Brothers. Quite a few months were spent exploring the business potential in Asian and Latin American countries for Waterpik’s line of water filters. The products were not suited to the country markets we were asked to explore however because, back then, even the urban tap water in these countries was usually not yet potable. Waterpik’s products were suitable only for optimizing potable tap water.
Shortly after that however, Amway sent Baytel to explore various Asian markets (especially China) for it’s eSpring line of countertop and under-counter water purifiers. Baytel provided crucial insights early on for Amway's Global Water Team (Amway even flew over their Country Managers from Asia to hear Baytel’s market presentations). This resulted in Amway very successfully penetrating the home water purification market in China and elsewhere: Amway’s eSpring endeavor became a $2 billion a year business in more than 40 countries. While facing greater competition these days, Amway’s eSpring line remains successful decades later, with its water disinfection reactor recently upgraded from using mercury lamps to use mercury‑free UV‑c LEDs from Asahi Kasei’s subsidiary Crystal IS. The LEDs can be switched on or off instantly so as to function only when water is flowing (thus increasing the usable lifetime of the disinfection module and decreasing the cost of disinfecting any given volume of water).
Decades ago, Baytel spent months on behalf of Rubbermaid Commercial exploring the potential for replacing the then ubiquitous asbestos-cement elevated residential and commercial water storage tanks in Latin America with with plastic tanks. Baytel found that two European companies, one of which was the world’s largest supplier of construction materials, controlled the Latin American asbestos industry completely, and that they were determined to aggressively protect that highly profitable business. Baytel advised Rubbermaid to not risk pursuing the idea at that time.
Baytel’s relationship with Cuno began in the Americas and evolved to cover various markets in Asia; this continued when 3M acquired Cuno, and also when 3M’s Separation and Purification Sciences Division was spun off to become part of Solventum.
Baytel extensively researched the markets for, and technologies behind, residential reverse osmosis for Yamaha Motor (including the less wasteful “water-on-water” RO systems that don’t send as much water to the drain), exploring various country markets for consumer water treatment products manufactured by Yamaha in Indonesia for its Kitchen Systems subsidiary in Japan.
When Recovery Engineering launched its Pur brand of end-of-faucet-mounted filters optimizing tap water in the USA in 1986, the product beat the pants off of Teledyne Water Pik’s faucet-mounted filters because the Pur product provided visual indication of when the filter cartridge needed to be replaced while Water Pik’s products did not. (Baytel had previously observed widespread use in Japan of faucet-mounted filters that provided the user with visual indication of the remaining lifetime for the filter cartridge.)
Baytel subsequently supplied information about the Mexican market to Recovery Engineering in preparation for their 1993 launch of an iodinated resin-based water purifier there. Unfortunately, a financial crisis hit Mexico in 1994 shortly after the product was launched and the product thus became too expensive for Mexican consumers as the peso lost a great deal of value compared to the dollar. Recovery Engineering subsequently had Baytel analyze the market potential for Pur as competition to Brita in Europe (not a winning proposition, given both the entrenched competition and the great variety of faucet sizes and shapes there).
Baytel worked on a project for Monsanto in Mexico for a number of months in 1998 conducting countless interviews with senior government, water utility, hospital, bottled water, and other industry officials in Mexico City, as well as in other cities there and rural areas. Among other discoveries at the time: the wastewater from Mexico City was being transported out of the city through the Grand Canal to the Mesquital Valley in Hidalgo where the untreated “liquid gold” was being layered directly on fields to nourish crops. The infant mortality rate there was then said to be 15 times the national average.
P&G purchased Pur in 1999 and did well with the line but it had not yet become a Superbrand when top management started to divest some of the company's smaller brands. Baytel gave a presentation on the global market and recommended that P&G consider trying to purchase the number two player in China: Qinyuan. P&G’s Water Team gave Baytel a standing ovation for that presentation but did not move quickly enough to act on Baytel’s suggestion. As a result, Pur was sold to Helen of Troy’s Kaz Division.
In 2001 Baytel’s Matt Moes was brought in by A.O. Smith's SVP of Corporate Development, Steve Rettler, to pitch the idea to their CEO Robert O’Toole and the other SVPs that A.O. Smith should enter the “adjacency” of manufacturing RO-based water purifiers for consumers in China because of the enormous market potential that Baytel saw developing there. At the time, A.O. Smith was a huge manufacturer of water heaters — but it did not yet make water filters or purifiers. The implementation of this suggestion resulted in a major source of revenues and profits for A.O. Smith and its shareholders, with RO units and RO membrane manufacturing eventually also being exported to India and more recently also conducted there.
Baytel worked with Unilever at the highest levels supplying numerous studies of the potential for the Pureit in markets all over Asia and Latin America — starting well before the original product (an inexpensive countertop purifier with an ingenious point-of-use chlorination “germ kill” module) was publicly announced in 2004. We subsequently supplied Yuri Jain’s Water Team at Hindustan Unilever with numerous market studies covering Asia and the Americas as the Pureit line broadened to include other configurations and technologies.
Baytel began providing market information (largely for “emerging markets”) to Brita GmbH in Germany before and during Brita GmbH’s 2010 — 2015 International Expansion Phase when Brita expanded into markets like Russia, Taiwan, China, and Turkey. After that, Baytel provided data and insights for Brita’s expansion into various other countries in East and Southeast Asia.
Baytel also worked with Clorox — both while Clorox had a licensing and distribution agreement with Brita GmbH, and later after Clorox acquired sole rights to the Brita brand in the Americas. Clorox and Brita GmbH have both launched (or considered launching) non-Brita brands in order to sell water treatment products to consumers and commercial establishments in markets where the licensing and distribution agreement between them precludes one or the other party from using the “Brita” brand.
Back in 2005 Baytel published its first “Global Markets” report quantifying demand on the part of consumers in key countries for water treatment products used at home. A new edition of this “Global Markets” report has been released approximately every three years since then, with the underlying spreadsheets iteratively updated and expanded periodically to cover more countries and more product types. In 2016 Culligan International was acquired by Advent International and in 2018 and 2019 Baytel produced a customized version of its quantitative model for Advent segmenting the global residential and commercial water treatment markets for products and services.
While unable to travel internationally during the Covid pandemic, Baytel worked on estimating market demand, product designs, and IP protection for a new global product it has invented: an inexpensive and utterly counterintuitive new type of water dispenser for residential and small commercial use. Baytel will soon be seeking a financial partner to move the product designs into functioning prototypes and then production. The most favorable site for volume manufacturing will likely be Mexico, Malaysia, or India.
The 2025 edition of Baytel’s “Global Markets” compendium of market studies consists of 50 individual country “chapters” grouped into 10 regions and then quantitatively summarized globally by product type. It also separately quantifies the “consumables” aftermarket (replacement filter modules and cartridges, service, etc.) needed to keep each of these product types functioning properly, depending on the installed base and consumer compliance assumed for each country market analyzed.
