We worked with the Carbon Trust and The Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to work out the ‘carbon footprint’ for our entire business system.

We calculated all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with growing the fruit, transporting the fruit, crushing and blending the fruit, manufacturing the packaging, bottling the drinks, distributing the drinks and keeping them cold in the shops.  This is how it breaks down.

Once we knew the CO2e emissions involved in each step of making our drinks, we were able to establish that the key areas for us to start reducing emissions were growing and packing, our packaging materials and smoothie manufacturing. 

Our audit also showed us the carbon emissions associated with each of our recipes. This is what it looks like for our regular smoothie range.

It’s hard to put these figures into context, as doing carbon audits for individual products and sharing the information is still pretty new. We had an idea about what a daily allowance for carbon might look like, and worked out that our smoothies were about 1% of that.

As you can imagine, doing a carbon footprint for the whole business system is a big and complicated piece of work. We certainly don’t claim that the figures are perfect and in some cases, where we didn’t have all the data, we have made assumptions based on secondary information and expert advice. So it is best to view our carbon footprint as a good start, some work in progress if you like. And we are continually improving our methods and measurements to get them more and more accurate.

*CO2e means carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent. Basically we measure all the greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone and then for each gas work out the equivalent amount of CO2 that would have the same impact on climate change when measured over a specified timescale (generally, 100 years).