how do you like them bananas

Top bananas at a Rainforest Alliance credited farm we visited.

Bananas are hands down the worlds most popular fruit. They are the most important food crop after rice, wheat and maize. That's a pretty important role to play.

Seeing as bananas are so important, and that we use them as an ingredient in all of our smoothies, we like to make sure we choose exactly the right ones. That not only means choosing the freshest, best quality and best tasting yellow fellows, we also insist that they are all sourced to highest possible ethical standards.

That's why we only use Rainforest Alliance certified bananas found with the help of our friend Carlos.

In order to be credited by the Rainforest Alliance banana growers have to meet a set of important ethical standards which are put in place to help protect communities and the environment. They then get to use the below stamp and become a potential innocent smoothie banana.

All of this means that you can rest assured that the bananas in your smoothie are helping to protect workers rights and the local environment where they are produced. Not to mention they're damn tasty and good for you.

the innocent foundation scholarship

Back in April last year we ran our first innocent foundation scholarship for someone from innocent to go out and visit a foundation project. The deal is that person has to roll up their sleeves while they are there, help out with what needs doing and then come back and tell us all about it.

Our first scholar was Helen who visited the Irula Tribal Women's Welfare Society project and helped them to put together a new website. You may remember some of her updates live from the ground. She also made a little film (above) while she was there.

Now that we've added a conclusion to our first scholarship we can tell you about our second. It's going to be to the Microloan Foundation in Malawi. We've just decided who's going and will give you an update soon. You can be sure that there'll be lots of reports just like Helen's here on our blog later this year.

simple steps

Thanks to Peter who sent us in a link to this great little video.  You can also click here for more info.  When you think about it, it really is pretty simple.   

ha hulu

We've talked before about the exciting work the innocent foundation been supporting with Send a Cow. Way back in 2005 we agreed to provide some funding to help the villagers of Ha Mapathe village in Lesotho to make some real changes to their lives and now 3 years on we're just about to transfer our last grant to them and we're so excited by what they've achieved we thought you'd like to hear about it to.

Lesotho has just been through it's worst drought in 30 years and the Ha Mapathe farmers have been finding life tough, but the villagers say they would be in a worse state if they hadn't put so much energy into building keyhole gardens, double dug beds and hafirs (water storage tanks), which have enabled them to grow enough vegetables to be able to survive.

Richie Alford Send a Cow's Programme Co-ordinator recently asked some of the Ha Maphathe women if they were happy as a result of the project - their response was 'Ha Hulu' . . 'absolutely definitely, in a big way!' What a fantastic response.

If you're stuck for what to buy Auntie Vera for Christmas and fancy helping people like the amazing villagers of Ha Maphathe you might want to take a look at www.sendacowgifts.org.uk/innocent

Posted by Linda (innocent foundation guardian)

one hundred thousand trees

We broke through our 100,000 trees Buy One Get One Tree target yesterday. Woo hoo. That's over 200 football pitches worth of trees and means we can support all of the planned community tree planting schemes in Africa and India.

Joanne and Gavin were the one-hundredth thousand registrants at around mid-day on Wednesday 14th November 2007. Thanks Joanne and Gavin, we'll try and rustle up a little something for you to commemorate the occasion.

And thank you to everyone else who's registered a tree so far. As the project has been so successful we are going to extend the deadline up until December 10th, so every tree over the original 100,000 will also be planted and cared for in India or Africa.

This is the first time we've run a project like this on this scale and as it has gone so well we are thinking about doing it again next year. To make it even better we'd love to hear what you think of the project and any suggestions might you have to improve it?

Downloadable certificates for each tree planted?

Badges for your FaceBook/ MySpace/ Bebo profiles?

More room to add longer messages to each tree?

More information on the communities the trees are going to?

We're open to any idea or suggestion, please leave your comments on this blog post.

an update on our compostable bottle

This weekend saw a piece in the Independent on Sunday questioning our trial of PLA plastics (our eco bottle) this year.  The thrust of the piece was that PLA is not such a good thing. As you may have read in the blog before, we've now made the decision to move away from PLA and go for 100% recycled plastic across the range. Having looked at all the pros and cons, and talked to industry experts, we think that for our bottles it's better to stick to working with waste material (ie recycled plastic), rather than creating bottles from new materials (even though they are made from renewable resources).

We're always up for a debate and, when it comes to environmental issues, it's usually pretty complicated. Sometimes you try new things out  and you don't get it quite right. It's true that the UK isn't quite ready for PLA. Lots of people don't have compost heaps yet. Councils here are just starting to do more composting. When we launched our PLA bottle WRAP (the government recycling body) said it was ok to have small amounts in with PET recycling, and supported the trial at the levels of PLA we'd use in our trial. But the recycling industry are now reporting that they are finding it hard to cope with PLA. We'd definitely checked about the use of GM corn, and knew there was no possibility of contamination from the plastic, so we opted for a scheme where they offset any GM corn with a tonne of non GM corn. If you are ordering in huge quantities, you can make suppliers change the way they behave and that was our goal in the long term. It was a trial after all, and you can't always go to trial with something that is the perfect version of itself.

All we'd really like to say to you is that we'd like to keep being allowed to try new things out. And when we do, we'd love it if you could tell us whether you think it's the right thing to do. We work hard to make decisions we are all proud of, but together we can do this better.

PS. One last thing. Claire's dad put one of our first ever bottles in his compost and it disappeared just fine. Maybe he's got special manure.

a thousand words

Air freighting food is a bit dumb. We don't air freight any of our ingredients, and we thought that this illustration, which we came across the other day, explained it better than we ever could.

buy one get one tree part 2

We had this idea a while ago to plant a tree for every smoothie we sold. We thought we'd call it 'Buy One Get One Tree' and gave it a go. It seemed to work quite well, with over 16,000 trees being registered and planted. Some people got really intoit, like San here.

Then we thought we'd try it again but this time a bit bigger. We're going for 100,000 trees now. That's a lot of trees. They'd cover 200 football pitches if you planted them all next to each other.

So what do you need to do? Well, look out for any of our special 1 litre smoothies with green bits on them (as shown below), register your unique code here and Bob's your uncle. We'll make sure a tree is planted in India or Africa and then looked after for 30 years (by our friends at Carbon Clear who are very good with trees).

You can even add a message to the tree you planted in our virtual forest or donate it to a friend if you're feeling nice.

I called mine Woodie.

 

our brand new 100% recycled plastic bottles

We've been working on the rest for a while. But today is when we can finally announce that we got to 100%.

Our bottles are now made from 100% recycled plastic. It's a world first, and heralds a huge reduction in our carbon footprint. Here are some facts, comparing the new bottle's impact versus the old 50% recycled version:

• 20% reduction in materials (we've made the bottle lighter)
• 55% carbon reduction
• 100% recycled content
• 100% recyclable
• 100% food safe

Next up, we're changing our label paper so that it's made from 25% recycled content and 75% FSC certified paper, and we'll be working on getting this better too.

Making our business better involves a series of steps. Sometimes they're small and almost unnoticeable; sometimes they're pretty big and have a large impact on the way we treat the planet. Today is one of the slightly bigger days, but we'll keep doing the small stuff too. We'll keep working on the rest, because we want to build a company that we can be proud of.

well behaved pineapples

We like to buy fruit from farms that make that extra effort to look after their workers and the environment. So we've been buying Rainforest Alliance certified bananas for a while now, and are keen to get our pineapples certified as well. However, at the moment there are no farms certified to the standard to provide them to us. Our Jess went to visit pineapple growers in Costa Rica recently, to learn more about pineapple farming, and to understand what actions were needed to get the farms certified.

After a bit of research and chatting to the farmers, it seems that the three main areas the farms are working on are conserving biodiversity, protecting the soil from erosion and worker safety. So we'll be working closely with the farms and auditors from the Rainforest Alliance over the next few months on these three main areas, and will hopefully get that certification. Oh yes.

Yolanda and Francisco (Rainforest Alliance auditors), and our Jess

A word about the pineapples we'll be buying...they're called Mayan Gold and are really juicy and sweet.  The plants and the pineapples are very prickly on the outside, so you have to wear special clothes when picking them, to protect your skin. The pineapples are prone to sunburn if they're on the outside of the plant, which means that they don't look so pretty but they still taste great.