We take our fruit seriously at innocent, so not only do we want it to taste great, but we also want to make sure we buy it from suppliers that look after both their workers and the environment.

Our fruit comes from all over the world and from thousands of different farms of all types and sizes - large plantations, co-operative groups, tiny family farms and even from the Amazon rainforest. This means that there is definitely no one size fits all approach to buying responsibly. We go about it in a number of different ways:

• We learn as much as we can about our ingredients - how they are grown, the challenges for our suppliers, and how we can help them.
• We have our own set of minimum standards covering all relevant environment and social issues for suppliers that are not covered by existing certification schemes
• We favour suppliers certified by independent environmental and social organizations (such as the Rainforest Alliance), and pay a premium for certified fruit
• We work on sustainability issues in partnership with our suppliers for particularly troublesome issues

Of course, we cannot promise that our suppliers are perfect. We're certainly not perfect, so we can't expect them to be either. But we do ask that they abide by fair, minimum standards, and work to improve their social and environmental performance year on year. Our strategy is to work with people who are the most committed to making real improvements and then we will help them get there. Achieving our goals is going to be a long journey, and probably one that will never end, but every small positive change is a step in the right direction.

Whilst it is important for us to have our own set of standards - to document what we feel is really important and what we want to work towards - we also need to recognise that there are some existing certification programmes out there that are achieving great results, and we don't need to recreate the wheel. After visiting banana plantations in Costa Rica in 2005 we committed to only buying bananas from Rainforest Alliance certified plantations.


innocent smoothies = 100% Rainforest Alliance certified bananas