Innocent Smoothies: Reinvestment Projects

Following on from posts about being cruelty free, eco friendly and sustainable, I wanted to write about innocent and their legacy of sustainability. innocent try to make it easy for people to do themselves some good (whilst making it taste nice too). innocent started in 1999 after selling smoothies at a music festival. Since then they've started making veg pots, juices and kids' drinks, in their quest to make natural, delicious, healthy foods that help people live well and die old.

Being sustainable is key at innocent. It might make them sound like a Miss World contestant, but at innocent, they try to leave things a little bit better than they find them. They strive to do business in a more enlightened way, where they take responsibility for the impact of their business on society and the environment, aiming to move these impacts from negative to neutral or (better still) positive. It's part of their quest to become a truly sustainable business where they have a net positive effect on the wonderful world around us.

Below you can see their strategy for doing so as well as their performance to date:

·      sustainable nutrition

·      sustainable ingredients

·      sustainable packaging

·      sustainable production

·      sustainable legacy

I just wanted to expand a little on this last point of leaving a sustainable legacy. innocent seeks to redistribute some of the wealth the business creates to those people that need it. They do this by the employees, shareholders and the company of innocent drinks donating 10% of profits each year to charity, primarily to the innocent foundation, which funds rural development projects in the countries where our fruit comes from. Set up by innocent in 2004, the foundation's vision is to build sustainable futures for the world's poorest people. They aim to support people dependent on subsistence agriculture because they believe it is essential for communities to get the most out of the natural resources available to enable a sustainable and improved future.

The innocent foundation, since its registration in 2004, has supported 37 projects, committed almost £1.3 million to community projects and used its funding to leverage an extra £5.8 million from major public grant givers such as the EU and DFID. The foundation's projects have so far helped 505,000 people (the equivalent of 100,000 families). And it will continue to help many more.

Some of the other projects that innocent is working on include:

·      drinks for the homeless: working with FareShare to get excess stock to those who need it.

·      the big knit: how knitting over 500,000 little bobble hats for innocent drinks raised over £250,000 for a good cause in 2009

·      buy one get one bee: a catchy name and a project that helped to introduce over 2 million honeybees into Britain's cities and countryside.

·      taste not waste: a little project to do good with unwanted fruit.

So support innocent in their good work by buying their products!

Blessings!

Ronell x

“If you have love you will do all things well” {Thomas Merton}