Food safety authorities announced on Friday that plans to create new, unified national standards on bottled drinking water are under way - a move that experts believe is crucial to ensure the product's safety.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission is speeding up its consolidation of current standards on bottled water, and new national standards will be published, China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment said in a statement.

The quality of bottled water has recently caught public attention, after one of China's largest producers was found to be using a provincial government's water standard instead of the much-stricter national ones.