'tis the season...

...to be eating cauliflower, parsnips, potatoes, celeriac and purple sprouting broccoli. Fruit fans should wrap their chops around British apples and pears.

A tasty veg curry and some baked fruit sound pretty good to us.

 

You can find more recipes and tips for reducing food waste at Love Food Hate Waste, and up to date information on what's in season at Eat The Seasons.

 

valentines for everyone

Fancy something different to an overpriced heart shaped pizza in a restaurant packed to the rafters with shiny balloons this year? Then look no further, because this Valentine's weekend, our friends at food charity FareShare are collaborating with Forgotten Feast and their eco-chef Tom Hunt to produce a unique 3 course banqueting experience – Valentines for Everyone.

For £40 you'll get a fantastic 3 course feast of delicious but unwanted food that might otherwise end up in landfill. Not because there's something wrong with it, but because too much was ordered, it was in the wrong packaging or it was just a bit wonky. 

Vegetarians and meat eaters will both be catered for and everyone will sit together for the feast, so even if you don't have a date you won't have to dine alone. The banquet will be held in FareShare’s east London warehouse, and every ticket sold will enable FareShare to provide an additional 80 meals for the hungry and vulnerable people they support, thanks to grant-giving charity StreetSmart who are generously matching the number of meals raised though ticket sales. FareShare rescues surplus food year round and delivers it to local charities all over the country.
 
Tickets are available for dinner Friday 10th February, Saturday 11th, Sunday 12th (late lunch) and for dinner on Valentine’s Day itself and include 3 courses, a drink and canapés. Get them here.

And to see the work we've been doing recently to prevent perfectly good fruit from going to waste then take a look at our taste not waste project here.

taste not waste competition winners

A couple of weeks ago we ran a competition for ten lucky schools to win a blender* from us as part of our taste not waste campaign, and we're delighted to announce that the following schools will be receiving their prizes in the new year: Trotts Hill Primary and Nursery School, Stevenage, Littledean C of E School, Gloucestershire, All Saints School, Putney Common, Rudyard Kipling Primary School, Brighton, Belvedere Infant School, Kent, The Acorns Centre Short Stay School, Lancashire, Courtlands School Widey Lane, Plymouth, Emmbrook Junior School, Wokingham, Dorothy Goodman School, Leicestershire and New York Primary School, North Shields.

 Thanks to everyone who entered. It really wasn't easy picking the winners at all.

 

*No bike power necessary.

 

have yourself a merry little sustainable christmas

Mariah, Elton and Cliff are firm fixtures on the office playlist, the chocolate tin is steadily filling with empty wrappers and we're eating a lot more cheese. Christmas is most definitely on its way.

'Tis the season to be jolly, but we've got a few tips from our friends at Wrap and the WWF to help you get through the festivities as responsibly as possible.

1. Make friends with your freezer

A defrosted freezer is a happy freezer. It's also a more efficient freezer. And a man (or woman) who doesn't have to pick his way through 6 inches of ice just to get to his emergency pizza after a night on the tiles is a very happy man.

Each year in Britain we throw away around £12 billion worth of perfectly good food from our homes, most of which ends up in landfill. So over Christmas it's worth making full use of your freezer to store any food you won't get to eat in time. It's also handy for keeping bread in if you know you won't get through the whole loaf.

2. Wear your Christmas jumper with pride and turn down that heating

You'll look good, you'll feel good and you'll save money.

3. Embrace the Brussels sprout

Buy local, buy less and enjoy more seasonal fruit and vegetables such as spuds, parsnips and Brussels sprouts. Visit Eat Seasonably for information about what fruit and veg is in season now and visit Wrap for tips on how to reduce food waste.

4. Don't buy unwanted gifts

5. Make some stuff from other stuff

How to make a Christmas Tree from paper from RecycleNow, who have some other very nifty videos too.

 Merry Christmas one and all.

fruit by numbers

Taste not waste (our little project to do good with unwanted fruit) is coming to the end of its trial run at East Sheen Primary School, so we thought it was worth a look down memory lane at how it's all gone. In the 10 or so weeks it's been running we've seen:

1 founder on a Blendavenda

 

1 MP Zac Goldsmith on a Blendavenda

Quite a lot of cheering (or jeering?)

300 children on the Blendavenda (those that could reach the pedals, and not all at once)

450 happy smoothie-filled kids

 

1 visit to the Houses of Parliament

And over 1500 portions of fruit saved

 

To celebrate reaching our target of 1500 portions of fruit and being well on our way to 2000, we've got ten blenders to give away to ten lucky schools. We'd love it if we could kick start a mini waste revolution, so we've put together this handy guide to help others do good with unwanted fruit. To be in with a chance of winning one of our blenders for your school click here, and please get your entries in by Friday 16th December.

our pledge

Tackling food waste is really important to us as a business, so we're really happy to be one of the first business to sign up to the Feeding the 5000 Food Waste Pyramid. 

The pledge has been developed in partnership with Love Food Hate Waste and is supported by the Mayor of London, and it offers businesses a really simple set of priorities to follow to help them save resources and divert waste from landfill.

We have waste reduction targets in place already and donate any excess drinks to the charity Fareshare or to be used as animal feed, but we're always looking at ways we can improve and we know that this will be a great help to us and to others who are looking to do things a bit more responsibly.

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.

our friends at fareshare

Over the past few weeks we've been turning perfectly good fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste into smoothies at a local school, and we've been helped along the way by FareShare who've been delivering the fruit to East Sheen Primary School each and every week.

FareShare are a national UK charity supporting communities to relieve food poverty, and our Lou popped down to their depot at Park Royal the other week to see just what goes on in an average day.

Here she met Daniel, the depot boss (the chap on the left), and David, a nice man who works there.

As well as promoting the message that ‘No Good Food Should Be Wasted’ and providing training and education in safe food preparation and nutrition through their Eat Well Live Well programme, FareShare get good quality surplus product from the food and drink industry to people who really need it. In 2010/11, the food redistributed by FareShare contributed towards more than 8.6 million meals. That's a lot of food.

Here's where the goods arrive





Pineapples and oranges like these are perfect for turning into smoothies



Pointing at things in crates is par for the course when you work in a warehouse



David checks off the day's orders to make sure everything's going to the right place.

To find out a bit more about what we're up to and watch a video of our Rich on a bike-powered blender head here http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/tastenotwaste/ (if you're a bit short of time, skip straight to 1:20 to see the man himself in action).

introducing the waste-o-meter

We're hoping to save 1500 portions of unwanted fruit from going to waste by turning it into smoothies at a local school over the next few weeks, and what better way to measure our progress than with the latest addition to our ever growing family of o-meters - the waste-o-meter. 

So far we've saved 540 portions of perfectly good fruit from a bin-shaped fate, so there's still a bit of a way to go, but like the proverbial tortoise we’ve every confidence we’ll make it.

To find out how your school could get involved head here http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/tastenotwaste/ and keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks as we’ve got some blenders to give away to some lucky schools if we reach our target.

taste not waste - the launch

Last week we launched our exciting new project - taste not waste. Our Lou, Rich and Jojo headed down to East Sheen Primary School with a merry band of helpers from innocent, the guys from food waste group A Taste of Freedom and Zac Goldsmith MP. 

 

 

There, we turned 170 portions of fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste into delicious smoothies for the kids, and will be doing so every Friday for the next 7 weeks.

There was lots of (supervised) chopping

A little bit of fooling around

Prentending we'd won the World Cup

 

Smoothie supping aplenty

And sitting on benches that were clearly too small for us.

 
 

You can track the progress of the project here via the magic of our very own waste-o-meter, and if you fancy doing a similar thing at your school we've put together a handy guide with some hints and tips on how to go about it. We'd love for you to give it a go yourselves and help save even more perfectly good portions of fruit from going to waste.