free lunch

This Friday Tristram Stuart, the lovely ladies from A Taste Of Freedom and a few helpers are making lunch for 5000 people, and you're all invited. 

 

Highlighting the ridiculousness of food waste, they'll be cooking up a storm with fresh ingredients that would have otherwise been thrown away. So expect wonky carrots, misshapen potatoes and other surplus yet still delicious veg aplenty.

If the photos from last year are anything to go by, it's well worth a visit to watch all of this

be abracadabra-ed onto plates like this

and into waiting mouths like this

 

You'll have to be quick though, it's first come first fed.

We've also got a little project on the go to try and do good with unwanted fruit. It's called taste not waste and you can read all about it and watch a video of Rich on a bike powering a blender here.

reusing our packaging

 

Tales of weird and wonderful ways to make use of our packaging once the contents have been enjoyed never fail to make us smile.

Apparently our veg pots make great homes for chilli plants and orchids

 

 

 

Our fruit tube packaging can be turned into a mirror discovery box for exploring in the garden

 

 

Juice carafes come in rather handy for impromptu games of skittles (add water to make things a bit trickier), and the caps are the perfect spot for growing just enough cress to spruce up an egg sarnie.

 

It also turns out that our kids' smoothie boxes are just the thing for carrying sick ducklings to the vets 

And as if that wasn't enough, they make pretty nifty conveyor belts for transporting snacks from one end to the other too.

 

 

 

Thanks to Matt, Laura, Dominic, Emily, Ian, Mrs Barry, Minnie's mum and Craig for the photos and suggestions. 

If anyone thinks they can top these, we'd love to hear from you.

are you afraid of the dark?

 

At 8.30pm this Saturday it is global earth hour, where people all over the world will be turning off their lights and pledging their support for the planet. This won't be a problem at all for Delia, who told us some time ago how she's helping tackle climate change. Please take care if trying this at home though, Delia does eat a lot of carrots. It's probably also best to keep your eyes open.

 

 

Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights off to take a stand against climate change. Earth Hour 2010 was the biggest yet, with a record 128 countries and territories joining in the global display of climate action.

 

  

This year's Earth Hour takes place on Saturday 26 March at 8.30PM (local time), and as well as being the perfect opportunity to finally do that moonlit treasure hunt/ghost story marathon/sponsored silence in the dark* you've been planning, it's a chance to think about what else you can do to make a difference once the lights are back on.

So get involved, switch off the lights and anything else you can do without for the hour (hair straighteners included) and get ready for some good clean wholesome (and potentially candlelit) fun.

 

*any other suggestions for how to spend the time will be gratefully received, we're really struggling.

knit 5, purl 2, sustainable living

So as you have probably noticed, it's that time of the year when we run the big knit - our campaign to help keep thousands of older people across the UK warm and healthy during the chilly winter months.

It's also that time of year when the days are getting shorter, it's only really warm if you're standing in direct sunlight with no wind, and you start thinking about turning on the heating again. During a visit to one of our suppliers we were asking them about the actions they take to use a little less and Chris told us about using wool from his sheep to make jumpers for the family.

It reminded me of the campaign run by Global Cool last year - 18 degrees of inspiration. Where they talked about really simple ways to stop wasting cash, look better (even lose weight) and reduce energy usage.

I think Rach from innocent watched their video.

   

So if your knitting skills are honed from producing hats for our little bottles, perhaps consider trying a jumper (or in my case a scarf - I need to keep practising).

Jess

office bikes

We have three new office bikes.

Sniggering aside, these bikes are for little trips down to Hammersmith, up to Shepherds Bush or for lunchtime jaunts along the river.

They've been christened Handle and Gretel, Dick van Bike and Jimmy Saddle (who was down the shops, buying elevenses during this photo call), are available for anyone at Fruit Towers to borrow and are much greener than driving a van (not to mention cheaper than forking out for the gym/that 6:30am spinning class).

Maybe one day, they'll get a grass covered passenger attachment

But for now, we'll have to settle for backies.

a shed, some veg and lots of busy bees

It's not all spreadsheets and calculators in the merry land of innocent finance.

Last week, the whole Finance team spent a day at Kew Riverside Primary School helping the children to build an allotment on the school field so that they can grow their own veg and maybe some bee friendly flowers. Next thing you know they'll be putting the veg in pots (that rings a bell).

 
But it wasn't all gardening. We also did a spot of shed building too with Rob and Lynne (crowned master shed builders). 

We thought the shed would be handy for storing all the gardening tools but the children thought it was more useful for a sneaky game of 'How many people can you fit in a shed at one time without it falling over?'. If anyone is interested the record so far is 10.

And with the help of lots of little hands (sorry about the paint on their school uniforms) we transformed a plain old boring white wall...

... into a beautiful mural that the children designed.

That's Roberta in the red T shirt. She's in the Finance team and not a pupil in case anyone was unsure.

We figure friendly finance folk couldn't have done any of this without the amazing help of Gareth Miller from the Open Living Company and Paul Munckenbeck from M&S Power Hire. They both donated their time, expertise and lots of materials to our little project at no cost.

They kept us on track on the day and rallied their suppliers to help as well.

Big thanks also go to John at Brewers for the paint, everyone at Alsfords for the timber and Nick from Motive8 for putting us in touch with Gareth.

Here's Gareth and Paul looking tired but happy after a hard day's work. They aren't used to grafting.

 

Paul even let Lou B (aka The Stig) have a go on his digger.

Thanks to Debbie and everyone at Kew Riverside Primary School.  Maybe you could all drop in to see us at Fruit Towers one day? 

 

We'll send a grassy van round to pick you up.

buy one get one bee

Bees. Busy little fellows, and pollinators of plants. It would be safe to say that we'd have a lot of troubles getting our fruit to people if it wasn't for bees. As we found out when Jon popped over to the blueberry fields of Nova Scotia a while ago. So we thought we'd help the bees along this spring with our new project buy one get one bee. We'll be helping to introduce 2 million bees back to the UK with every one of the below special packs bought. The recipe of the special smoothies? Lemon, honey and ginger of course.

 

Go seek them out in the shops (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Boots should all have them in stock in the next few days). The little bottles also come complete with a pack of free bee friendly seeds. If you don't have a garden of your own why not go guerrilla gardening, it's all the rage at the minute we hear.

sustainable sunday grub

At a loose end this Sunday?

If you're in London town, why not head down to the Arcola Theatre in Hackney for a delicious 3 course feast made entirely from food that would otherwise be thrown away.

The lovely ladies from This is Rubbish are following their successful sustainable smoothie fest at The Feeding of the 5000 in Trafalgar Square a few months ago with this evening event.

There will be food, music and talks from Tristam Stuart, author of Waste - Uncovering the Global Food Crisis, and Richard Reynolds, founder of Guerrilla Gardening London.

As the famous saying goes - One man's rubbish is another man's Sunday roast.

Or something like that.

getting better all the time

Four.

 

The number of seasons (hello spring)

The number of elements (earth, wind, etc)

The number of meals in the day (breakfast, lunch, treats, dinner)

And the number of sustainable packaging criteria we use here at innocent. 

When it comes to choosing suitable new 'housing' for our smootihes, these are the four things we care about most:

1. To use low carbon footprint formats wherever possible

2. To make our packaging as lightweight as possible

3. To make things out of either renewable or recycled materials

4. To make all our packaging widely recyclable.

Unfortunately it's often really hard to tick all four of these boxes.

Our big cartons do a great job in that we're ticking currently the first three boxes OK. However, there's still some room for improvement on the last one.

When we launched our big cartons, very few councils were recycling them at all.

The good news however is that little by little, these sort of cartons are becoming more recyclable. 86% of councils now collect cartons at recycling centres and one in five councils will collect kerbside (in other words, from your front doorstep). You can read more about it here.

In the same way we managed to get our little bottles to 100% recycled PET, it takes time and patience.

But little by little things improve.

We're still working on making our veg pots and squeezies packaging tick more of the boxes and will keep you posted on our progress right here.

an innocent guide to Copenhagen

The planet's doomed right? It's time to pack the tinned goods and head north. Well not just yet, but we are definitely in last chance territory to keep our climate in a more friendly condition. World leaders will be gathering in Copenhagen this December to try and secure a crucial international agreement for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There's a bit more information from our Sustainability Jess about why this is all so important on our new innocent guide to Copenhagen page.

Jess will be visiting the Department of Energy and Climate Change in November to meet Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Ed Miliband will be attending the Copenhagen meeting so we thought we'd ask him some questions about the meeting, the UK position and climate change. If you have a question you'd like Jess to ask Ed then complete the form here and we'll pick the five most popular questions for Ed to answer. This guy is important in getting the deal we need in Copenhagen, so it should be interesting to hear what he has to say.

Want do even more yourself? Then check out this site.