Hello there. I'm Sustainability Lou and my job at innocent is to work with people across our business to ensure we're all working as sustainably as we possibly can.
This year, my number one priority is water.
At the moment I'm having to do some pretty tricky sums in order to calculate the water footprint of our smoothies; involving quite a lot of head scratching, pencil chewing and some fairly hefty spreadsheets.
So why all the hard sums? Well, we all know water is a precious resource which is increasingly scarce in many regions of the world, including several parts of the UK. By working out how much water we use as a business, from farm to fridge, we can both improve our water management practices and also identify and protect the regions in our supply chain displaying the greatest water stress.
If you fancy having a go at working out your own water footprint for yourself or the place you work, check out the Water Footprint Network website here. Alternatively, there are some great tips on how to reduce your own personal footprint here.
Soon as I've done all my sums and figured out how to put them into Excel, I'll let you know what our water footprint at innocent is and how we plan to make our water shoe size that bit smaller.
Vice Admiral T. R. Cardboard-Box, Sir Reginald Bubblewrap, Lady Margaret Cell'Ophane - oh yes, the great and good of the packaging world were all out in force last week for the annual UK Packaging Awards.
The glitzy ceremony was held in the Grosvenor Hotel in London and we picked up the rather heavy, slightly sharp edged yet nonetheless coveted award for 'Brand Client of the Year'.
Beating off strong competition from Apple, Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola, we won in recognition of our 100% recycled bottle, our quest for sustainability, our all round packaging design and for being the brand most people would like to work with.
Which is always a nice reason to win.
John Inverdale presented our Jaqueline and Simon with the award, confessing in hushed tones he had 'literally millions' of our drinks at home.
a) A tool for working out where we get our fruit from
b) A really fancy cheese plate
c) The Barclays Green Leaders in Business Award trophy
Yep, it’s C (we know the silver plate at the bottom gave it away).
This week has been a great week - not only did the sun shine for about 15 minutes on Wednesday, but we also won a Barclays Green Leaders In Business Award. The awards were designed for British businesses to demonstrate how they are addressing the global environmental challenges we all face through the use of new processes, technology, products and services.
We really liked the philosophy behind these awards as it was about proving that sustainability and being a successful, competitive business can go hand in hand. Becoming a sustainable business is something that we passionately believe in and all of us are committed to delivering our sustainability goals.
We know that there isn't always a perfect solution but there is definitely always a better one and we’re not afraid to work hard to achieve our goals. As the old saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed – keep trying until you do. It's been a really busy year on sustainability for us so far. We've been working on:
Getting our pineapples from Rainforest Alliance certified farms - The first pineapple farms in Latin America were certified at the end of 2007, and we took the first delivery of certified pineapple earlier this year.
Rolling out our own set of minimum standards for sustainability with our suppliers which cover all relevant social and environmental issues.
Introducing a brand new label for our bottles made from 25% recycled paper and 75% paper from forests that have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Reducing the amount of paper used in our kids’ wedges and 1L carton by 10%.
Introducing key performance indicators for all our production, packaging and logistics suppliers to drive forward continuous improvements in the areas of energy, water and waste.
Whilst we’re immensely proud of the work we’ve achieved so far, we know we have a long way to go, and the journey never really ends.
Sustainability is always a process of constant improvement to ensure that we are running the business in the best way possible and that we make the most responsible choices as we grow. Every day we are looking for new ways to become a more sustainable business and encouraging our suppliers to do the same. Our plans going forward are to make the step change from ‘greening’ our current business model to what we are calling ‘advanced sustainability’ (until we think of a catchier term). Basically, we want to challenge everything about our business to make sure we’re doing everything that bit better.
In terms of this award, we were up against some pretty tough competition so we are extremely chuffed that we won. A big thanks to the judging panel for picking us as a winner, to our suppliers for working towards our sustainability goals with us, and to everyone who works at innocent for doing their little bit.
Good morning. It's Saturday and we are blogging live from our village fete. Very exciting.
We picked up the papers on the way to the park and read some stuff in the Telegraph about us being a 'greenwash' company. So we thought we'd clear up a couple of the points raised.
First of all, we did have some out-of-date information on our website, which we changed earlier this week. We need to get more efficient at checking it all, so we shall.
But we still stand by what we have always said - we want to make the best quality drinks with the lowest possible carbon
impact. To do so, we buy the best ingredients possible and then find
the most carbon-efficient way of getting them to our drinkers. We have
a policy of moving our ingredients by land or sea only; we will not air
freight them.
Our ingredients come from three main geographical
areas - the UK, continental Europe and the tropics. The tropical fruit
arrives in Holland via Rotterdam, Europe's main fruit port, and is
blended in Holland with the European fruit on a daily basis. We then
put the blended fruit into chilled tankers (the same as used for
transporting fresh milk) and bring it by boat from Holland to the UK.
The tankers come to the UK ports that are closest to our bottling
sites (our main sites are in Wales and Somerset) to minimise
transporting by road in the UK. We then blend these ingredients with
the locally squeezed fruits (eg our oranges) and other local
ingredients at our UK bottling plants and then deliver the smoothies to
our customers. All of this happens six days a week, as we don't
squeeze and blend on Sundays in the UK. This way of blending part of
our smoothies in Europe with the European fruit and then in the UK with
the other fruit and ingredients means that we minimise the amount of
energy used in transporting our ingredients, ensuring we get the best
drinks for the least carbon.
As you may know, this week is Recycle Week 2008, and our friends over at Tetra Pak are doing their best to raise the campaign's awareness. We use Tetra Pak's cartons for our big smoothies, so we're obviously very keen to get as many people reycling them as possible.
Tetra Pak are hoping to get as many people as they can to reycle the cartons and you can even pledge to do this on their website. Most councils in the UK will now recycle cartons, so it's really just about raising awareness.
If you'd like to find out more about the the project, you could have a look on Tetra Pak's website. This video of cartons being recycled in Brazil is also pretty interesting.
We're still fully in our 'take your comments on board AGM week' at the minute so here's another update on how you're all constantly helping to make us a little bit better.
Last year towards the end of our Buy One Grow One Tree project we asked you all if you could think of anyway to improve the project in future. You gave us some great feedback as comments to this blog post. A lot of the comments concerned us giving you more information on where the trees are planted and the communities benefiting from the trees.
So Geoff got our man on the ground in India to have a look about with his video camera. Here's the result.
We've also made a little Google Map showing you exactly where some of the trees are planted (Thurinjapuram, India) so you can zoom right up. Don't go too fast though, it's like virtual sky diving.
You also said that you wouldn't mind it if you could add our virtual badge to FaceBook profiles as well as blogs and stuff. So we've fixed that this year too. You can now add a badge to your own page by planting a tree and then going here.
We'll be asking for even more feed back again towards the end of this year's project don't worry, but if you have any thoughts or ideas to let us know now just add a comment to this blog post.
If you've ever wondered what it's like over here at Fruit Towers but have never had a chance to take us up on our offer to pop around, then have a quick watch of these two clips.
One is by Abi from Hippyshopper and the other by a French TV channel. Both star our Sustainability Jess who's as equally great with cameras as she is at doing ventriloquism in French.
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.
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:
kate on the people's label
kate on the people's label
Emily on please say hello to our new british spring greens veg pot
Emily on diabetes and chocolate
Karen on summer reads (makes me feel fine)
Emma on summer reads (makes me feel fine)
Nina Martin on summer reads (makes me feel fine)
Anne Yarr on summer reads (makes me feel fine)
jonathan on you learn something new everyday