Vermont Pure, Cape Cod Quality Service

At JMJ Beverage, customer service is the family business

For 20 years, JMJ Beverages has been providing Southeastern Massachusetts with fresh, clean drinking water. Vermont Pure water is bottled straight from the highest quality springs in New England and delivered right to your home or business. “We provide bottled spring water service to homes and offices across Southeastern Massachusetts. We are an independent distributer located in Sandwich, and we service roughly 3,500 customers,” says owner Michael Kayajan. 

Kayajan and his brother Jack have the beverage business in the blood. “We grew up in the soda business at Coca Cola of Cape Cod, which was a family business. My brother had started a water business on the side and shortly after college, we became partners and started building up the water business,” explains Michael. “We’ve carried several different brands over the years, and through acquisition, we adopted the Vermont Pure brand about 12 years ago.”

The Kayajans, along with third partner Joel Gould, make up JMJ Beverage which brings “family owned and operated” to a new level with their customer service. “We specialize in providing a personal service for our customers. It’s a little more personal than your typical water company; if you call our office, you’re going to get one of the owners on the phone, and if you have an issue, we’re going to handle it right away. We just make sure that we’re going above and beyond for our customers and making sure we provide everything at a fair price,” Michael says.  

For those thinking about the quality and convenience of water delivery, Michael explains the benefits, “The two choices to having spring water are tap water and buying bottled water. You can do your own research into each town’s tap water, find out what contaminants there are and what disinfectants are in the water. All municipal water has to be filtered and to some extent, disinfected. While Spring water is a lot less processed, we don’t have the concerns of contaminants in the pipes under roads, etc. It doesn’t have anyit doesn’t have any chlorine or fluoride put into it to disinfect it. I think these days most people are drinking bottled water in one form or another, and when you have the five-gallon bottles delivered to your house on a monthly basis, the amount of trash and waste you’re not producing anymore is astronomical. It’s a great, environmentally friendly way to continue to drink bottled spring water, while not having to throw away or recycle plastic bottles. We’ve had so many customers tell us they didn’t realize how many plastic bottles they were using and throwing away and how much extra trash they were producing and throwing away on a weekly basis.” 

JMJ Beverages is committed to making the world a little greener and to increasing their sustainability wherever possible. “When the bottles come back to us empty from a customer, they are put on racks and shipped back to the production facility. They’re then sanitized, refilled and recapped and shipped back to us. The life cycle of a bottle can be quite some time. It can be refilled multiple times before it cracks or wears out or is unable to be refilled. That alone cuts down on our impact on the environment. We recycle everything that we can in our office and in our warehouse,” says Kayajan. “We also work with Nauset Disposal and their single stream dumpster, where you don’t have to sort recyclable materials. You put it all in one spot and they handle it for you. We run the most fuel-efficient trucks we can, and we keep them up-to-date so they run as efficiently as possible, not just so they run well, but also so we use as little fuel as we can.” 

But most importantly, Michael says, “We are a regional brand throughout New England, but we are also a locally owned business. We all live here on Cape Cod. I’m in Hyannis, my brother lives in Osterville and Joel is in Sandwich. When you spend money with us, it stays here. It doesn’t go to a large conglomerate or a holding company somewhere else in the world. We are a locally owned and locally operated business. That really seems to mean a lot these days and that’s why you’ll get one of the owners on the phone when you call us. And most importantly, you’re putting money back into the community.”

You can find JMJ Beverages online at vermontpure.net, in person at 23 Jan Sebastian Drive, Sandwich, or call at 508-833-7873.

Text by Elizabeth Shaw