blueberry fields

You learn something every day.  Today I discovered that the blueberries in our smoothies are wild blueberries, picked from the forest floor in Poland.  Here's another picture of their forest:

What a nice place to grow.

turophiles

Turophiles = lovers of cheese, derived from 'tyro', which is greek for cheese, don't you know. Yesterday was the monthly meeting of cheese club here at Fruit Towers. Each month we choose a theme (past favourite - cheeses with funny coatings). After a round of tasting, we vote for our favourite, which gets shortlisted into the annual cheese-off in December. Yesterday's theme was Italian cheeses and we tried Bel Paese (rather like Dairylea), Taleggio, Torta Gorgonzola, Fontina, Pecorino Rosso and Dolcelatte. Taleggio won.

story box

Today we sent 24 new designs for our big 1 litre cartons to the printers. Here they are stuck on the wall of our library so everyone here can have a read. We refresh all the cartons with new stories about every 3 months. These ones talk about loads of different things from how the company has changed as it's got bigger to why our alphonso mangoes are a bit like Glenn Medeiros.

Next up we're doing new stories for all our little bottles. Kat, our packaging designer, will be setting about 130 different labels which she can do in about 2 days. She's good.

lovely kew

This is Phil who works at Kew Gardens (sorry about the slightly rubbish photo Phil).  He very kindly gave us rides around in his electric buggy when we were over there yesterday to do a little bit of filming for our new telly advert.  The gardens are looking really lovely right now - we found out it takes 800 people to keep them that way.  We'd recommend a visit if you possibly can.

our little road

Here's something we like. Our Little Road is a website that was set up by a 12 year old called Jake. He felt that his neighbours didn't talk to each other that much, and wanted to find a way for them to get to meet and help each other a bit more.

Nice work Jake.

the golden rule of advertising

We had a meeting this morning about making a new advert for the telly. Very exciting. Note the biscuits on the table - all good advert meetings need biscuits.

let there be light

It's the least dark day of the year. Go sit outside until dusk. The sun sets at 21.21

a whole load of apples

This lunchtime's mission was to pack lots of apples into little cardboard boxes, then get them sent out to people all over the place. These apples-in-a-box are invitations to Fruitstock - we all sat together, packed up a few thousand of them and put some pretty little tags on the apples with all of the invite details. Of course, putting apples into boxes is hungry work, so there was some pizza in the garden for the weary troops afterwards. And some apples.

bad samba

After work yesterday, some of us got together for drum club. The idea is that we learn a tune on the samba drums then play it on stage at fruitstock. It was only our second practice and while we're doing OK at connecting stick with drum and making lots of noise, we're still not too hot at banging in time with each other. Our instructor, Barak, is pretty patient, but I don't think this is going to be the easiest gig he's ever had.

best soft drink in the world ever

Well, not quite. But our mangoes, coconuts and lemongrass smoothie has just won the Best Soft Drink award at the Q Awards (the foodie Oscars). It's the fifth year running that one of our recipes has won, and as you can imagine, we are stoked/chuffed/as happy as Larry.

Nikki invented this recipe (thanks Nikki). It was only on the shelves for a few weeks earlier this year as one of our guest recipes. Guess we'd better think about bringing it back.