save the children

We sent some drinks over to Save The Children last week, and as part of their Save The Children week, they sold them and raised £400.

Save The Children have just launched an emergency appeal in response to the Burma cyclone. They've already got 500 people on the ground and tonnes and tonnes of food and other aid being delivered. So if you feel like donating your lunch money to some people who really need it, click here.

please say hello to carlos

This is Carlos. You might recognise him from his guest role in our new telly ad.

Carlos is our man on the ground in Latin America.  He works with the Rainforest Alliance, a charity that is pioneering a better way of growing fruit that helps protect workers, local communities, wildlife and the environment. It's a great organisation and one we're proud to help support.  Currently, all our bananas come from Rainforest Alliance accredited farms.  And we're working with Carlos to introduce this more enlightened way of growing to the places where our pineapples come from. Ultimately we want all fruit to be grown in this way. 

Carlos' official title is quite appropriately 'Fruit Supply Coordinator' and he knows the fruit industry inside out having run his own banana plantation for 20 years previously, which makes him a very good friend for us to have.

Some other interesting facts about Carlos include:

he's got a great moustache

he scrubs up nice when invited to awards ceremonies

other than fruit, his main passion in life is great Costa Rican coffee, of which he can be seen enjoying a cup with our Simon above.

He even gave us a bag of his absolute favourite coffee to bring back to fruit towers with us.

Thanks Carlos. Keep up the great work and good luck with those pineapples.

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.

free learning

We know that people sometimes stop by our blog for some business inspiration and an insight into our entrepreneurial world. Well that and trying to win a stack of great CDs by finishing a random sentence.

Anway we thought we'd share some stuff with you that will save you a good few quid on going to expensive conferences. First up is our Rich (above) giving a bit of background on innocent. You may notice that he's got himself a bit out of sync in the video. This happens every now and again especially in Monday morning staff meetings, a good slap on the back normally sorts it out though.

Then the nice people at Thoughtful have been very, well thoughtful and posted up some webcasts from an thought provoking recent conference on business and sustainabilty. It includes some interesting thoughts from our friend Russell (a connoisseur of interesting things) talking about Wattson's and stuff.

Last but not least is another great set of webcasts from Little Big Voice organised by our friends at howies in the summer. Russell turns up again here (he's good at talking) along with our very own Dan.

the best sausages

The boys from Treflach Farm came in yesterday and let us try their sausages.

Delicious. Read more about their story, and rejoice at the fact that they are about to start a delivery service. Mmm, sausages by post.

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.

jim demetriou - a tribute

We don't have time to talk about the people in masks and capes, but we do want to let you know a little more about the man who isn't wearing a mask or a cape.

His name is Jim Demetriou and he was one of the first people to ever sell our drinks, via his company JD Foods. When we started out, Jim was pretty much the first wholesaler to sell our drinks, shipping them in his nicely refrigerated vans, and delivering them to all sorts of delis and cafes and foodie places all over London and sometimes further afield.

Indeed, this author remembers the regular Friday afternoon drive to visit Jim in Tottenham, where we'd settle that week's accounts (which involved Jim giving us a few quid) and talk about the weekend and other important things.

Without good people like Jim we wouldn't have got our business off the ground, so we were honoured when he popped into Fruit Towers this week, for the first time ever. It seemed like the circle was complete; like when the ghost of Yoda turns up by the campfire at the end of Return of the Jedi. A special moment. Thank you Jim.

But where did the moustache go?

helping out after the floods, part 2

Some more pictures of our drinks being distributed in Gloucester after the recent floods, sent to us by a nice man called Derek.

giving them away

Hello to the folks in Newby (Scarborough) who we sent some drinks to recently. We said we'd post your pictures here, so we have.

We met these Yorkshire folk via some work we've been doing with School Friend, the largest charitable provider of childcare in the UK. Over 75% of their clubs are run in deprived areas and they're trying to improve the diet of the children in these areas by offering them a healthy eating programme. Hopefully our kids smoothies are helping a bit.

helping out after the floods

Elin's local pub, last week

A word from our Elin on something that we did to help out in the aftermath of the floods:

"I live in Gloucestershire and was affected by the floods last week, so I was quite keen to help out. Last Thursday we sent 75,000 kids smoothies to the Red Cross depot in Bristol where the smoothies will be put into food packs and distributed to families/children in the flooded areas."

You can read more and see a pic in this newspaper article.