Twelve years ago, sucking up deep-sea water off Hawaii island and selling it for as much as $6 a bottle in Japan sparked a rush of companies trying to get into the business. But only one really took off as a brand.

Now a company that tried to make it big in the industry but stumbled, Kona Deep Corp., has repositioned itself with an aim to compete with sports drinks and enhanced water in the giant U.S. beverage market.

Kona Deep’s water, which gets largely desalinated, is the same. So is the brand name. But the company has a new marketing target for the product, which it now touts as a better rehydration and recovery beverage than sugary sports drinks and enhanced purified waters because the Hawaii water pumped from 3,000 feet below the surface off Kailua-Kona naturally contains electrolytes.

“Until now, consumers had to choose between spring water and highly processed functional purified waters with artificially added electrolytes,” the company said in an announcement. “With Kona Deep, bottled water drinkers no longer have to choose between purity and performance. The new brand offers both.”

Kona Deep resumed selling bottled deep-sea water in Hawaii and mainland stores about a month ago after a hiatus of a few years.

The “new brand” is being led by heavyweight food industry executives, and local investors who acquired Kona Deep about five years ago.

Pat Turpin was recruited about a year ago as CEO. Turpin, a former manager for Costco’s snack packaging business, co-founded a major brand of air-popped potato chips, Popchips, and was the snack company’s president until last year.

Turpin said he sees Hawaii deep-sea water in a similar position as air-popped potato chips were when he started Popchips. He said there were other air-popped potato chips in the market, but Popchips emphasized the health qualities with strong branding at a time when many consumers were seeking healthier but still tasty alternatives to fried chips.

The same consumer shift, Turpin said, is occurring with beverages as more American consumers look for hydration drinks that aren’t filled with sugar and other additives.

Another Kona Deep player is Tom Flocco, board chairman. Flocco is a former CEO of distilled spirits maker Beam Global Spirits & Wine, now part of Beam Suntory. He previously held positions at business consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and consumer products firm Procter & Gamble.

Local attorney Mark Mukai acquired Kona Deep with other Hawaii investors in 2010 after dramatic expansion plans fell flat for the company, which was founded in 2005 by a team that included two state government officials who were lured by the prospect of capitalizing on an endless natural resource.

Bottled deep-sea water had been a beverage in Japan touted as a heath drink since the mid-1990s. Then a Japanese company, Koyo USA Corp., built a production plant in 2003 at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority in Kona, where deep pipes tap supercold, nutrient-rich water mainly for aquaculture tenants.

Koyo began producing more than 200,000 bottles a day under its MaHaLo brand and exported them to Japan, where 1.5 liters retailed for $4 to $6. The company said it couldn’t keep up with demand, which amounted to $1 million a day in revenue based on production and an average price of $5.

Without any scientific backing, the water was marketed as a dietary supplement assisting with weight loss, stress reduction, improved skin tone, digestion and other health benefits.

Jeff Smith, NELHA’s executive director at the time, thought it was a joke when he received the initial inquiry about bottling seawater at the tech park.

Yet a year after Koyo started up, there were four other companies leasing space at the park with plans to build seawater bottling facilities, and Smith quit to join one of them — Kona Deep — as chief operating officer.

Steve Bretschneider, deputy director of the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, also left his state job and became chief marketing officer of Kona Deep, which at the time was incorporated as Deep SeaWater International Inc. and used the brand name Kona Deep.

In July 2005 Kona Deep held a grand opening for a $5 million bottling plant and became the second company commercially producing deep-sea water at NELHA.

Kona Deep said at the time that its 7,500-square-foot plant capable of producing 40,000 bottles of water in a shift was an initial step toward an 80,000-square-foot plant. The company, which exported its water to Japan, also said it intended to branch out into “nutraceutical” and aquaculture production.

In 2007 Kona Deep started selling water in Hawaii and select other states while testing the market on Guam. The company also announced that its second bottling plant was about to break ground and boost production capacity to 1 million bottles a day.

The expansion, however, didn’t happen. Mukai’s group stepped in to acquire the company and revamp operations in 2010. Smith and Bretschneider are no longer with Kona Deep.

Mukai said the new owners initially kept production going, and signed a contract to have a $10 billion Japanese food and pharmaceutical products company, Meiji Holdings, distribute Kona Deep water in Japan.

However, the Meiji deal was unwound, and Kona Deep halted all sales in Japan, on the mainland and in Hawaii over the past few years as the company couldn’t fulfill demand, according to Mukai.

“We had to pull everything back,” he said, adding that a new strategy was needed.

The new strategy for Kona Deep represents an ambitious goal. Competitors facing the company include Coca-Cola Co., which owns Glaceau Smartwater and the “nutrient enhanced water beverage” Vitamin Water; and PepsiCo Inc., which owns Gatorade and the purified “electrolyte water” Propel.

Turpin said “premium” bottled water is a growing market in the United States, where sales have more than tripled over the past five years, according to Beverage Digest data.

“Deep-ocean drinking water is a billion-dollar category in Asia, but this is still very much a new category of bottled water in the U.S.,” he said.

Turpin declined to disclose production capacity but said the original plant has been modernized with more efficient equipment. He also said Kona Deep is the only company selling its own branded Hawaii deep-sea water on the mainland.

Kona Deep claims that its water provides a “very different hydration experience” because of a unique blend of naturally occurring electrolytes.

Turpin, the CEO, said he expects that a study being done at the University of Arizona will yield scientific results about the effects of deep-ocean mineral water on exercise performance and recovery.

Kona Deep is pricing its water competitively with national brands of premium water. In Hawaii the retail price for a bottle of Kona Deep is about $2.29 for a liter and $1.39 for 500 milliliters. It’s in about 150 stores.

On the mainland, Kona Deep water is sold in the Sprouts supermarket chain in Arizona and intends to expand into other states.

As far as other companies that jumped into the Hawaii deep-sea water business besides Koyo and Kona Deep, one never developed a plant, while two others — Destiny Deep Sea Water (formerly Enzamin USA) and Hawaii Deep Marine — distribute water that is bottled and sold by other entities.