making apples even greener

It’s fun staying in a fancy hotel, isn’t it? Just ask any of the bees that have nipped into one of our farmers’ bee hotels. They come from far and wide to stay in their 5-star hangouts and do all their pollinating business. It’s all part of our work with our apple suppliers to make a healthy and biodiverse environment to grow their fruit in.

But we’re onto bigger plans next. We want to reduce pesticides and carbon in our supply chain to make sure our soil is healthier and everything is as green as possible. It’ll help our farmers out in the long run too.

To do this, we need to look after our wild pollinators. That means coming up with other ways of dealing with crop pests and introducing wildflowers as a different and diverse source of food. They’ll return the favour by giving us tastier crops (and more of them).

We have to sort this out because as it stands, non-sustainable farming is the biggest culprit when it comes to loss of biodiversity, and agriculture contributes to 35% of the world’s carbon footprint.

The little guys that do our pollinating are also more important than ever, with the amount of agricultural production depending on them going up 300% in the last 50 years. And at innocent, we rely on them for 86% of our ingredients by volume. That’s a lot of critters we’ve got to thank.

So we’re launching a project with some of our apple suppliers to make things greener, by planting wild flowers to attract pollinators and exploring better ways of managing pest control. This will mean a lower carbon footprint and a load more fruit, which is a win for us and a win for our farmers. The project will kick off in January 2021, and we’re buzzing to let you know how it’s going.