As many of the fruit varieties that we buy are not covered by existing certification schemes, we have our own set of innocent minimum standards. The standards contain our wishlist for what we want our suppliers to achieve, covering all the relevant social and environmental issues and our expectations for how each supplier should be performing against these issues.

Our standards were put together by reviewing most of the internationally recognised standards that are out there on all these issues (such as Rainforest Alliance, SA 8000, ETI and Fair Trade), as well as the standards of major brands and retailers who we think are doing great work in this area.

Each of the requirements in the standards is rated as critical, required or future.

Mandatory - for those requirements that are an absolute must have for the supplier to supply to innocent. Mandatory applies to such things as paying minimum wage, no child labour, no land clearing and protecting watercourses from pollution.

Required - for things that we really want our suppliers to do but that might require some training, resources or investment from the supplier to meet the requirement. These actions require a conversation between innocent and the supplier to agree a realistic timescale to meet the requirement and to develop an action plan.

Desirable - this rating has been used for best practice actions. We are not asking our suppliers to set a timeframe to achieve these actions, but to aim towards them in the spirit of continuous improvement.

We check the performance of our suppliers against the standards in one of three ways:

Innocent visit - someone from innocent getting out to the supplier to check their performance.

Formal audit - get out the clipboard and go through each requirement point by point. Audits are conducted by an innocent staff member or an independent third party.

Self assessment - we have a lot of suppliers who source from even more farms, and there is no way we are going to be able to go and visit them all. In some cases we are going to need to rely on our suppliers to conduct a self-assessment of their own performance. We do this for suppliers that we deem to be low risk, or who we have already visited.