innocent drinks

It's that time of the year again where everyone's got their rackets out. And strawberries and cream are doing the rounds.   Now we aren’t experts with a racket, but we are always on the ball. And we know a thing or two about strawberries. So here we are serving you lovely lot some facts.    🍓 The average strawberry has 200 seeds, and they're the only fruit with seeds on the outside. Because of this, strawberries aren't true berries, like blueberries or grapes. They're actually part of the rose family.     🍓 Strawberries are a source of fibre, vitamin C, manganese and folate.    🍓 Louisa Handley, RNutr (AfN), our nutritionist, wouldn’t let us skip the fact that they aren’t heart-shaped for nothing. They are a known symbol of love. Rumour has it that if you split a strawberry in half with your crush, it makes you fall head over heels in love. 👀

We believe the lovely lot that work here should be able to bring their best and most natural selves to work. Which is why a big focus for us this year has been on intersectionality. Whether it's gender, race, class, religion, or sexual orientation, these things shape us into the people we are today. But just because we are similar in one way, doesn’t mean we have the same experiences overall. It's important to chat about and celebrate those differences to make sure we don't bundle everyone together. Our Proud Bunch, our LGBTQIAplus affinity group, are the legends leading the conversation about our different experiences with all our other affinity groups. So for this year’s Pride Month, we’ve been waving both well known and less recognised flags in our windows. Like the diversity flag, which is there to represent LGBTQIAplus people of colour, and the disability pride flag, for gay and queer people with disabilities or who are neurodiverse. We’ve hung them proudly to show that everyone is welcome and supported at innocent. We know we’re not the experts. We wanted to talk about intersectionality because we want the people that work here, and even those that don’t, to feel able to be their best natural self. We loved seeing London come to life this weekend for Pride, Happy Pride, you lot.

Over the past few months we've been shining a light on people who've worked with us for a while. Even before smoothie bottles were invented and all we had were soup spoons, ladles, and our hands. Well, this week's in the limelight takes us to our Tom. Someone who's a bit fresher to Fruit-Towers and doesn't like to brag too much. So we thought we'd do that bit for him.   When he's not out on a cold rainy Tuesday with the innocent footie team. He's out making dashboards so dazzling, that he landed himself our Best Newcomer award. So for you lot just starting out, or wanting to make a change, check out what Tom has to say. And see if you fancy something new.

👨 🌾 1,991,318 👩 🌾 that's the number of lives across 46 countries that the foundation has proudly impacted over the past 20 years. Together with incredible partners on the ground, they strive to combat child mortality caused by malnutrition and empower smallholder farming families to grow nutritious food.   We're incredibly proud to continue our support of the monumental work they do. Hats off to being great people you lot!

WE GAVE AWAY SOME CASH This year we launched our third Farmer Innovation Fund, which is a pot of money (it was a pretty big pot of £1 million this year) we put aside annually to help our farmers lower the emissions produced from growing our ingredients.  So that we can keep putting delicious fruit and veg into our drinks we need to secure their availability for the future. This means helping our suppliers invest in regenerative agriculture (we call it regen-ag for short) practices that improve biodiversity, boost their livelihoods and capture carbon. And our fund means that every year we get to hear about the extraordinary projects our farmers are working on. This year 11 farmers wowed us with the very cool stuff they were doing in the regen- ag space. For example, one of our berry suppliers, Pixley Berries (Juice) Ltd Anna Ralph will use bio-stimulants and sensory devices to help look after our blackcurrant crops – we love it. Other winners like AGRARIAS MANCHEGAS SA have plans to transform into the first fully functioning smart farm in Spain. Frutilight in Costa Rica are working on their quest to find a biofertilizer plant for pineapple cultivation and honestly, we could list them all because they are ALL so great, but we won’t.  

It’s World Nutrition Day We were going to write a whole post about how much we love fruit & veg, because we really do and we want you lovely lot to love it too. But it's a Tuesday after Bank holiday weekend. And we didn’t write a post. So, instead here's a chat with Louisa Handley, RNutr (AfN), our company nutritionist aka out-of-hours fruit & veg consumption consultant/fruit & veg fact fanatic. 

Cast your vote today for the BREEAM People’s Choice Award. Our People’s Choice award is voted for by you, from a selection of the most innovative and inspiring #BREEAM certified projects from across the globe. Featuring high-tech laboratories, sustainable trade fairs, and large-scale logistics parks, voting closes on 5 June, so be sure to vote and tag your colleagues in the comments below.    Vote and learn more about our People’s choice nominees here:   https://lnkd.in/gUtYA4Up    Want to attend the BREEAM Awards? Book your tickets here:  https://lnkd.in/gY6kSj6u    #vote #BREEAMAwards #Sustainability #GreenBuilding  

The sun’s finally here and so is our monthly career Q&A with one of our lot.   This month we’ll be chatting to our very own ray of sunshine, David. Don’t tell him we called him that, though. He’s easily embarrassed.   He's been with us for twelve whole years which makes his career an official teenager. Luckily our David’s not one for slamming the bedroom door shut, but with that hair, he does look like he belongs in a boyband. Have a read as he talks about his time as a new dad, innocent’s culture, data and, somehow, zigzag scissors.

HAPPY BEE-DAY (not ours that was last month) We’re absolutely buzzing about bees When we aren’t shouting about the goodness of fruit and veg, we’re looking for ways to chew people’s ears off about bees.  So, when we Googled, 'Bee fans near us’, to find a hive of likeminded people to beefriend, we were chuffed to see a whole day dedicated to loving bees.  For the last two years, we’ve been studying pollination activity across 12 apple farms in two regions of Spain, we call it our Beacon Project. It’s not just us though, we’ve teamed up with the clever folk at the University of Reading, 3Keel, Zerya and Spanish research institutes CREAF, Universitat de Barcelona and IVIA.   And with the help of some apple farmers, we’ve been testing how different ways of farming can promote wild pollinators and make the fruit trees even more fruitful and resilient to climate change.  We’ve just finished the second year of research, testing out things like wildflower strips to attract pollinators. We found that in farm plots with strips that have been there a while we’ve seen the number of pollinators go up by 30% and we’ve even spotted some new species. We’ve also figured out that if we had enough pollinators to work on every single flower on the farm, we’d probably make 20-30% more apples! We’ve expanded our Beacon project to orange farms in Brazil too, where experts from the USP - Universidade de São Paulo are conducting research on the health of pollinators around the Atlantic rainforest. So as we suspected, the bees, moths and butterflies must be protected. 🐝

Our Sarah Munday has been busy lately, kicking off her podcasting career. A few weeks ago, she sat down with the lovely Jonathan O'Hagan as a guest on The Leadership Insights Series Podcast 🎙 She was joined by Rachel Chatterton from Holland & Barrett, and together they had a good chat about today’s fast evolving and competitive food & drink space. 🎧 If you fancy hearing about how our passion for fruit and veg guides the development of our tasty drinks, with goodness in every bottle, you’ll find the podcast on: Apple, Spotify, Anchor FM, Google Podcasts, and more! Or you can listen to the full episode for free here: https://lnkd.in/ecrq8zAp