A healthy business with a healthy product

Leading a healthy life should be easy - and healthy food should taste good. This is the business idea behind innocent drinks, who makes natural smoothies of pure fruit and nothing else. The road to the market shelves has been just as smotthe as the product.

In the space of just ten years, innocent has developed into an international company with offices in eight countries. The British company has more than a 80 per cent market share in the UK and, at an international level, sells two million smoothies a week – despite the fact that, as a natural quality product, innocent's smoothies are somewhat more expensive than their competitors' products.

Right from the beginning innocent believed in the consumers' taste. innocent started out with a small smoothies-stall at a music festival where peopl.e coult vote yes or no to the question "should we quit our day jobs and continue making smoothies?" During their first launch in London, innocent offered free samples to 50 shops and cafés. The next day, 45 of them came back asking for more and innocent has continued with this model, when they want to enter a new market. They want to meet as many potential costumers as possible by giving out samples at local stores and retailers, and this creates the strong foundation of fans of innocent which the company lives on - also when they want to get in contact with the major retail chains.

In Denmark, innocent took the lead on the smoothie market in 2008. In consumer tests, innocent smoothies have, on several occasions, been elected the best with top scores.

innocent has a very clear idea about wishing to create a product that is healthy, produced under fair conditions and introduced to the market in as environmentally-friendly a way as possible. innocents smoothies contain fruit and nothing else like sugar, concentrates, water or additives. All the fruit must comply with the special sustainability standards and forinstance it is pesticide-free.

Not only iregarding the production part did innocent take the environment into consideration. innocent also considers the most responsible approach to transport and works with the organisation Carbon Trust to find the best way to reduce their CO2 emissions. innocent has never, for example, used air freight and neither does it plan to.

innocent also goes to great lengths to create decent working conditions for the fruit growers that supply them with fruit. Together with the Rainforest Alliance the company works with local NGO's to ensure that both the environment and fruit pickers are treated responsibly.

innocent is, furthermore, the first company in the world to use 100 per cent recycled plastic in the manufacture of its containers/bottles. The labels on the bottles are made of recycled paper, and the ink is solvent-free.