waste not want not

So last week we told you about our quest to gather some positive stories about actions people are taking to reduce their carbon footprints. 

This week we focus on waste.  Did you know that UK households produce 106 million tonnes of waste each year? And 8.3 million tonnes of this is food.  A lot of the time the food has to be thrown away as we simply bought too much and didn't get through it all (easily prevented by not going to the supermarket when you are hungry...).  Biodegradable matter in landfill (food, paper, garden waste etc) produces methane when it breaks down, a powerful greenhouse gas (25x worse than carbon dioxide).

So what are people in Fruit Towers doing to tackle the rubbish bin...

Sustainability Lou sets a fabulous example by planning her weekly shop so as not to waste any food - although she did admit to the odd bit of lettuce going astray.

Clover not only works hard on finding recycled packaging for innocent products but when she is at home she recycles all her garden and food waste.

 Annabel has bought herself a lovely shiny new composter (although a little less shiny now).

 
Fliss has ensured that her bunnies need not feel guilty - their droppings (a much nicer word than poo) go into the composter.

Dave keeps a beady eye on his housemates to make sure that they are doing the right thing at the recycling bin. Dave sits opposite Sustainability Jess and Sustainability Lou - so he really should know what he is doing.

Apparently Alan thinks recycling is fun - I got the impression there was some sarcasm being expressed, but I ignored it as long as he keeps recycling.

 
Julia has committed to improve her recycling performance, although to be fair it sounded like she was already pretty good at it. Always striving to improve seems to be a common trait in the finance team, must investigate that further sometime.

Charlie makes sure that she buys recycled loo roll - after all we need to buy the products that are made with all the materials that people recycled (with no market for recycled products the economic argument for recycling goes out the window). That's one of the reasons we use 100% recycled plastic in our bottles (and it halved the carbon associated with the bottle). 

Want to know more about what to do with waste? Look here or some ideas to reduce food waste.  Got a bit of left over smoothie? You can make some nice cupcakes.

Hopefully some food for thought.. I am off to find a composter for my shiny new garden.

cake a look at this

If, like me, you're slowly but surely getting hooked on The Great British Bake Off (I was convinced I could smell the scones in this week's show), and it's inspiring you to get baking again, we have just the recipe for you.

This comes courtesy of the lovely Jen who is busy working on setting up her own cake company and wrote to tell us how she uses our drinks in her baking, specifically when icing the cakes.  The ones you see above are lime, passion fruit and mango cupcakes, but she reassures us there are loads of combinations you can try, such as a banana sponge with pineapples, bananas and coconuts icing, or a chocolate sponge with cranberries, blueberries and cherries icing. 

If you'd like to have a bash, here's Jen's recipe :

For the lime sponge :

• 110g self raising flour
• 110g caster sugar
• 110g margarine
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 large free-range eggs
• Rind and juice of 2 limes

Combine all ingredients with a whisk until fluffy. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 170C for 20 minutes.

For the icing :

• 300g icing sugar
• 100g unsalted butter (at room temperature)
• 150ml of your favourite smoothie (she used our mangoes and passion fruits in this recipe)

Whisk the icing sugar and butter together until fluffy. Add innocent fruit smoothie a 1/3rd at a time (don't let the icing get too runny, if it does add a bit more icing sugar) Once the sponge is at room temperature - ice your cakes & decorate.

And then voila, you can amaze your friends and family with your creativity and technically they'll be having some fruit at the same time.  Cake has never been so good.

Ready, steady, bake.

 PS - if you're really into all things cake, check out the Cake Britain exhibition at the Future Gallery in London this weekend.

join our wall of peace

When we first started blogging back in 2006 we mentioned Peace One Day in a very early post. We've always been very big fans of Peace One Day and their founder Jeremy Gilley's simple but inspiring vision of "if you build a house you start with one brick, if we want to build peace why not start with one day?".

So this year along with the return of one of our most popular recipes peaches & raspberries we're helping to spread the world of Peace One Day by making a limited edition Peace One Day smoothie. Look out for them in the shops and wear the free badge that comes with every little bottle with pride.

 

And you can help to spread the word of Peace One Day too by simply joining our innocent wall of peace website in a couple of clicks here and then telling all your friends. 

 

Here's to Jeremy and his small team and their ongoing mission of peace.

 

billy lots of mates

Bill Nighy dropped into Fruit Towers last week when he was doing some recording over the road

 

Everyone stopped playing ping pong to go and have their picture taken with him

 
But it's not just Bill who's been seduced by the bright lights of the Goldhawk Industrial Estate.

Over the years, we've had royalty drop by

the PM

Another chap called Bill

Mr. Kay

Johnny Vegas 

and the original Johnny

A gaggle of stars (on a chilly car park break)

 Scouting for Girls (back when they were still in Cubs)

Not to mention magicians, Olympians (of the gold variety) and a man who makes jam.

At this rate, we're going to have a Christmas special more star studded than the love child of the Royal Variety Show and Smash Hits Poll Winners Party.

In case you're wondering who would be the host, we've got that covered

(Ronnie that is. Not Sam). 

 

a little less

Climate change - no doubt about it, a fairly sizeable problem. It's pretty easy to feel overwhelmed by the science, the required reduction in emissions, and before you know it, you wonder if there is any chance of solving this gargantuan (yes, I had to spell check it) issue.

At innocent we've been working on our carbon footprint for a number of years - be it introducing our 100% recycled plastic bottle, lightweighting our packaging, or challenging our suppliers to improve their energy, water and waste performance year on year.

We feel pretty positive that we can successfully tackle climate change. Most of the actions we take not only reduce our carbon footprint, but also make commercial sense - if you use less you pay less - not exactly rocket science. 

We want people to feel more positive about tackling climate change, but talking about air compressors, reductions in blend waste, and energy capture is not inspiring for everyone. So we decided to start collecting examples of what people do in their day to day lives.  Whilst each example might not make that much difference with just one person, when loads of people do it, then we start to get somewhere.

 Super Eddie told us how he only turns on the lights in the office when we need them.

Whereas Delia doesn't turn on the lights at all if she knows her way.

Caroline makes sure if she does turn on the lights that they are powered by 100% renewable energy.

So does Ben W (although he was concerned he was having a bad hair day).

Simon is making sure he only buys new clothes when his existing ones are truly worn out (check out his elbow)  - thankfully Rach is pretty handy with her darning skills, and she even makes her own clothes.

Steve has ditched the car for coming to work, and now uses a train and bicycle combo.

Kate gave up her car entirely - very impressive.

 
Philippa does loads of stuff herself, but is really proud of her mum for putting in solar panels.

Jeremy uses a lot less toilet paper... we didn't push him for details though.

And Eva has even gone so far as to change her career to work in sustainability - including studying for her Masters.

We have loads more stories which we will be sharing - we hope that reading these have made you feel a bit more positive about things.

If you want some ideas for stuff you can do - check out http://www.wearewhatwedo.org/. Or if you want to share your actions with us, then please comment on this blog.

Here's to the future.

yo cheeseball. take a chill pill

 
As of today, cheeseball, vuvuzela, chill pill and staycation all officially entered the Oxford Dictionary of English, along with another 2000 or so new words.

We are still running our very own new word competition, so if you're itching to get your word officially recognised in the English language, then enter it here and we'll see how many times we can use the best one on our smoothie bottles and cartons.

as happy as a pig...drinking smoothie...

We love eggs.

We love Ian at Treflach Farm. He makes eggs (not him, obviously, the chickens).

 

Not only does Ian look after chickens, he looks after pigs too. This makes Ian a very busy man.

Not only does Ian look after chickens and pigs, he also finds the time to teach young'uns about how to look after our environment and how to play nice with animals.

Imagine how busy Ian is.

So being the nice folk we are, we decided to help Ian feed his pigs.

Was this enough?

 
Apparently not.

To avoid overfeeding smoothies to Ian's pigs (apparently they're just like us and don't like too much of the same thing) and to try and make the doggie relax a little bit, we needed a new way to help.

Luckily for us, Ian and the amazing team at Treflach Farm have already got a few ideas of their own so we decided it best for us to piggy back (sorry) one of theirs instead .

We love the idea of educating others about the birds, the bees, the flowers and the trees. After all, they're making the world a little bit of a better place for all of us.

 

Behind the scariest dog in the world lies a classroom that Ian and the folk at Treflach could use to run classroom sessions in but it needed a little revamp to get it ship shape.

Now, DIY isn't exactly our forte at innocent but we are pretty handy at fundraising. So with a raffle to win tickets to stay, that's right, stay at Treflach (fancy it?) and a BBQ, we managed to raise a pot of cash to help get the classroom on its way.

How was the BBQ?

Delicious. Treflach's finest of course.

How's the classroom?

Beautiful.

With the classroom ready and waiting for its first pupils in September, we thought it best to let Ian and the gang get back to what they're good at (which is pretty much everything they do) while we get back to what we're good at, making smoothies for everyone - animals included.

So far for piggies we're working on a mud and orange peel recipe.

The monkey range is looking like nuts and bananas, papaya and bananas or simply bananas and bananas.

If you've got any better ideas, post them below and the best one will win a case of our smoothies and a special mystery prize.

(Please note we don't advise you feeding your pets or any other animals smoothies. This is for mild amusement purposes only. We don't get out much).

atha's game

Atha.

 

Buyer of mangoes, writer of novels, loser of suitcases and a key component in the newly formed innocent Glee Club, he also happens to be a master of mind game trickery. 

On Monday morning, he had 180 people fall off their respective picnic benches/chairs/ping pong table in sheer amazement at the game he made us all play.

Rather than tell you about how mindblowing it was, you can experience it for yourself right this instant.

Just answer the questions below out loud very quickly (and don't cheat by looking at the end)

1. What's 2 + 2?
2. What's 4+ 4?
3. What's 8+8?
4. What's 16+16?
5. What's the first vegetable you think of?

180 of us simultaneously chanted this vegetable

Did you get the same?

A.m.a.z.i.n.g

More mind wowery from Atha very soon.

meet the keeper

To celebrate Buy One, Get One Bee, back in July we ran a competition for one lucky winner and a friend to come along to the National Trust's Hanbury Hall to meet Tim the beekeeper and ask him all sorts of questions.

The winner was Julian and he'll be going along in a couple of weeks time to meet Tim, see the bees and have a spot of afternoon tea (we'll keep you posted about it right here).

In the meantime though, we thought it'd be polite to introduce Tim properly.

So here's a few interesting things about the man himself:

• Tim's day job is as a computer software consultant so he looks after the bees in his spare time.
• He's been beekeeping for about 10 years now, after having told a friend he wanted to see inside a hive (and then ending up looking after the entire colony).
• His kids like to help him collect the swarms. That's his son on the right below (resplendent in mini bee keeper attire).

Tim has very kindly answered every question that came in as part of the competition because he's a good man like that.

Here are just a few of his answers to some of the questions we had through:

Aren't you worried the bees will sting you? (Teresa Hill)

Whenever I get stung, it's because I did something that I shouldn't have so I'm more annoyed with myself for not noticing it. For example, going to move part of the beehive and not realising I have a bee caught in the fold of my glove. If I frightened the bee by trapping it in my glove then I deserve to be stung. Still hurts though.

Does the smoke used to help pacify the bees have any effect on humans? (Elaine Miller)

Yes. It's makes my eyes water for a start. I burn rotten wood but other beekeepers burn cardboard, old sacking or special old tobacco. The smoke causes the bees to think their hive is going to burn down so they may need to leave in a hurry. Seeing as they don't have any luggage, they fill their mouths with honey and nectar. Then they get a bit sleepy (like we all do after a big meal) and can't be bothered to move. Which means I can get to the honey more easily.

Is it true that honey is made by bees regurgitating nectar? (Bronwyn Cannon)

Well seeing as they haven't got any baskets to carry in, yes it is.

For the rest of Tim's answers, check out the comments below.

P.S. If you still haven't tried our lemon, honey and ginger recipe, then you haven't got long left before our next special guest recipe hits the shelves.

So bee quick and get down the shops quick smart.

(pun shamelessly stolen from Ben W)

Good (not gold) diggers wanted

 
Not only do meerkats have a comparison website, they now have their own online dating site.  This came about after a lonely meerkat named Lilly was looking for love and needed a helping hand meeting Mr Right.  You'll be pleased to hear she found not only Mr Right, but Mr Darcy himself, and they've now become proud parents to quads.  Clearly they're both going to need a GSOH dealing with their new arrivals.

Thanks to Twinlakes Park for the photo of Lilly.