friday nonsense

Sammy Stephens, the man behind Flea Market Montgomery, is back with a little more magic. What a guy.

If you find yourself in a disco situation this weekend, perhaps you should give it a bit of Flea Market.

another homemade innocent advert

We really like it when people make home made adverts for us without us even having to ask. Like this one Dan found ages ago. So here's another one we've just found on that youtube place.

I love the eyes at the very end of it. What do you think?

friday came early this week

We'd usually post a clip of this calibre on a Friday, but we couldn't wait.

great adverts of our time

Before we go home for the weekend, here's something good that Stu found. A German advert for laxatives.

Well, made us laugh anyway.

our felicity's on the telly

Please say hello to Felicity. Felicity is one of our product developers here which means she is responsible for coming up with new recipe ideas and then making sure they taste just right.

As the creator of our brand new blackberries, raspberries and boysenberries recipe, we thought it only fair that Felicity star in our other new telly ad.

In anticipation of all the fan mail she’ll be receiving, here’s a few more facts about our Fliss:

She likes baking (her speciality is a coconut macaroon)

She does a good cross stitch

She is a member of the Rabbit Welfare Association and has two of her own rabbits called Pistachio and David. You must pronounce David as 'Davv-id' or he will give you the cold shoulder.

another new telly advert

Ted's done most of the blogging this year. Thank you Ted. So I thought I should help out again. Starting off by showing you another new advert. It looks a bit like the other recent one, except this time it features our Felicity and a brand spanking new blackberries, raspberries and boysenberries recipe. Not only did Felicity invent this recipe, she also sourced the special boysenberries to go in it. She’s great like that.

For those who are keeping tally, we’ve also added another gem to our collection of farmyard noises. Watch the ad and respect the mallard.

how do you make a smoothie innocent?

We're back on the telly again this month (as we hinted a few weeks ago) with our new ad 'how do you make a smoothie innocent?'

You can watch it above or watch it here if you'd prefer to see it a bit bigger and a bit better quality. It's all about our drinks and what makes them special (the fruit and the fine people who help us to find our ingredients and create our smoothies, in case you were wondering).

This version stars our friend Carlos from the Rainforest Alliance who has been helping us to find more and more Rainforest Alliance certified fruit, including bananas, pineapples and oranges. You can find out a bit more about how we work with the Rainforest Alliance here if you like.

We hope you like the ad. Let us know what you think if you have a second to spare.

making adverts

We are in the middle of making an advert, which means quite a bit of waiting around in draughty places like this.

There's quite a lot of drinking tea as well.

When making adverts, there's often someone shouting "Cut" and "Action", but this time things were more relaxed and there was none of that shouting business.

We can't tell you much about it at the moment, but it will feature fruit and a man with a really big head, and there will be some very simple animation (as usual). It'll be on telly in the New Year.

how many portions of fruit in a smoothie?

Hello. My name is Shilpee and I'm the company nutritionist at innocent. Firstly, I'd like to say we are sorry if people have been confused by anything we've said about our drinks. Our intention is always to try and keep things clear and simple, and we definitely don't want to mislead anyone about the nutrition of our smoothies.

According to the Department of Health...

150ml juice = one portion

80g fruit = one portion

Our smoothies all contain these amounts of both juice and crushed fruit, and therefore we are confident that they contain 2 portions. Professor Millward (who heads up nutrition at the University of Surrey, and helped set up the five a day programme for the government) double checks all the claims we make, and he says "because of the juice and whole crushed fruit content, 250ml of our smoothies counts as two portions."

We've been talking to the Department of Health about this. They broadly agree from a regulatory point of view that an innocent smoothie has two portions of fruit in it. They originally stated that a glass of JUICE counted as one portion as they were concerned if people only drank juice they wouldn't be getting the fibre of the fruit. Whereas a fruit SMOOTHIE contains crushed whole fruit that brings with it the fibre, antioxidants and vitamins you'd find in whole fruit, and so is nutritionally different from juice.

In April, new guidelines on portions in 'composite' foods will be issued. The Department of Health is considering evidence about foods such as smoothies to see how many portions they can claim in the future. Lots of these foods weren't around when they first made the recommendations about what counts as a portion and we expect that the new guidelines that will include portion recommendations for smoothies specifically.

Until then please be assured that all our smoothies contain nothing but fruit and a variety of it in both juice and whole crushed form.

Thanks.

Shilpee

an innocent advert in the news

Today there have been a few reports in the papers saying that innocent is trying to mislead consumers and make claims that aren’t really true. So we thought we’d give you our version of events. A while ago we decided to start making a detox smoothie, full of pomegranates, blueberries and acai – all ingredients that  contain a good amount of antioxidants. You can measure the antioxidants in a drink by testing its ORAC rating. So we did, and its ORAC rating was really high. Then we delved into the score some more, and found that it was greater than the ORAC score of the average five a day, according to studies in America.

Then we made an advert. And, though it mostly focussed on acai being natural, we also said that the smoothie ‘contains even more antioxidants than the average five a day’.

The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) got a complaint about it. One person thought it was misleading. And although we provided evidence, they didn’t agree with the study we used to back up our antioxidant message. They also think that the word detox should only ever be used about things that can prove they actively remove toxins from the liver, whereas we've always thought that detoxing naturally is about making sure you get the good stuff to balance out the bad stuff.

We ran the ad in October last year, when we launched the recipe. We have no interest in confusing or misleading people. When we find that one of our recipes is  packed with extremely healthy ingredients, we like to pass the information on. Ultimately, we only ever want people to understand that eating fruit and veg is the best thing you can do. And we’d never want someone to think just drinking one of our bottles was all they should do that day. We figure people are smart enough to know that we’re not a quick fix, and that you’ve got to  eat your greens too. So if you read anything about us trying to trick you, now you've got both sides of the story.