Inside Innocent’s carbon-neutral smoothie factory

Rot­ter­dam Port is an unlike­ly spot for a land­mark green invest­ment. The largest sea­port in Europe stretch­es for miles in a drab maze of rust­ed drums, slag heaps and stacks of ship­ping con­tain­ers. But on the far side of a scrub­by field packed with seag­ulls pops a famil­iar halo logo.

It sits atop Inno­cent Drinks’ new €225m (£198m) fac­to­ry, dubbed the Blender. Despite its unas­sum­ing set­ting, the fac­to­ry is packed with tech­nol­o­gy aimed at mak­ing it one of the world’s first car­bon-neu­tral, all-elec­tric drinks fac­to­ries. 

Inno­cent is a house­hold name in the UK for its colour­ful, healthy smooth­ies and juices and quirky brand­ing (its Lon­don HQ? Fruit Tow­ers. CEO? Chief squeez­er). But the com­pa­ny might be almost as well known for its ethos.

Ever since it was found­ed in 1996 by a group of uni­ver­si­ty friends, it has set out its case for “doing busi­ness in the right way”. A B‑Corp from 2018, Inno­cent gives 10% of its prof­its to char­i­ty and has set a sci­ence-based tar­get of being car­bon neu­tral by 2025 and net zero by 2040.

Why bring manufacturing in-house?

One road­block in achiev­ing those envi­ron­men­tal tar­gets was the fact that Inno­cent out­sourced all of its pro­cess­ing and bot­tling to a patch­work of sup­pli­ers across the UK and Europe.

“24 years ago, smooth­ies weren’t real­ly a thing,” says Emi­ly Wake­ford, sup­ply chain lead at Inno­cent, as ships glide past the Blender office’s win­dows.  “So our his­tor­i­cal sup­ply chain was real­ly seg­re­gat­ed. We had a place doing cold ingre­di­ents, a place doing blend­ing, many oth­er places doing bot­tling: every step was sep­a­rate.”

When Inno­cent first start­ed talk­ing about bring­ing it all in-house, the aim was to save mon­ey and cut down on road miles from trans­port between facil­i­ties. But the com­pa­ny soon realised there was scope to do more.

 “As the team start­ed to look at it, we asked, if we’re going to build [a fac­to­ry] – and this goes right back to the DNA of Inno­cent  – how do we do it in the right way?” says Kari­na O’Gor­man, Euro­pean head of ‘force for good’. That meant design­ing a new fac­to­ry from scratch with sus­tain­abil­i­ty con­sid­ered at every stage. 

The ingredients of a sustainable factory

On a stroll around the gleam­ing, straw­ber­ry-scent­ed fac­to­ry – the smell changes each day depend­ing on what recipe is being mixed up – the Blender’s site man­ag­er shows Racon­teur how it all works.

First up, the fac­to­ry is designed to run entire­ly on renew­able pow­er. Thou­sands of solar pan­els sup­ply about 7% of the site’s elec­tric­i­ty, with the rest com­ing from a renew­able tar­iff on the grid. On-site wind tur­bines, which cur­rent­ly going through the plan­ning process, will even­tu­al­ly take over. 

Inside, every­thing is elec­tric, from the machines that fill and seal bot­tles to ful­ly-auto­mat­ed robots that pick and pour drums of fruits and purees. 

Instead of tra­di­tion­al gas-fired heat­ing and cool­ing sys­tems, the Blender employs a heat pump which works much like a domes­tic ver­sion. Waste heat gen­er­at­ed by refrig­er­a­tion is cap­tured and used to pas­teurise drinks.

The net­work of pipes con­nect­ing the blend­ing, mix­ing and bot­tling equip­ment is kept spot­less with an ‘air tor­na­do’ sys­tem that shoots com­pressed air to remove grime. This reduces water use by 50% com­pared to con­ven­tion­al sys­tems.

One of the biggest inno­va­tions is a “world-first” fleet of 50-tonne all-elec­tric trucks. Some­thing like a car­toon ver­sion of an oil tanker in appear­ance, they fer­ry orange juice to the Blender from a stor­age depot 40 min­utes across the port, where it arrives on a ship from Brazil. Orange juice is Innocent’s main ingre­di­ent, and the bot­tled ver­sion is its first prod­uct to be cer­ti­fied as car­bon neu­tral.

Even the factory’s incon­gru­ous loca­tion was cho­sen with sus­tain­abil­i­ty in mind. Rot­ter­dam port is where much of the fruit used in Innocent’s drinks arrives from South Amer­i­ca and India – mean­ing 20% of truck miles could be slashed right away.

The port’s lead­ers have been “incred­i­bly sup­port­ive of us com­ing in and try­ing to do man­u­fac­tur­ing in a dif­fer­ent way,” says O’Gorman. “The whole port was already try­ing to move towards renew­able ener­gy: there are quite a few wind tur­bines around.”

Indeed, sev­er­al can be seen through the Blender office’s huge win­dows that over­look the North Sea: just one of the touch­es, along with bright colours, nat­ur­al mate­ri­als and green­ery, that make it “a great place to work and a fac­to­ry for peo­ple,” O’Gorman says. 

“We’re the first ever man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty that’s aligned to the WELL frame­work [for build­ings that pro­mote well­be­ing]. It looks at the health, well­be­ing, air qual­i­ty and envi­ron­ment.”

One thing the team couldn’t achieve was retro­fitting an exist­ing facil­i­ty to avoid con­struc­tion emis­sions. It would have been “near-on impos­si­ble” due to the scale need­ed, says O’Gorman, adding “and we didn’t own any fac­to­ries in the first place.” How­ev­er, reclaimed con­crete and recy­cled mate­ri­als have been employed where pos­si­ble.

A blueprint for sustainable design

All that effort paid off when the fac­to­ry was cer­ti­fied by BREAM NL, a sus­tain­able build­ing stan­dard, as ‘out­stand­ing’, the high­est pos­si­ble grade. It was par­tic­u­lar­ly reward­ing because the team did not have a tem­plate for what they want­ed to achieve, O’Gorman says.  

“There were times when we weren’t sure we were going to get where we want­ed to get… it became a bit of an aca­d­e­m­ic chal­lenge for our part­ners and for us to look at the tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions.”

Close col­lab­o­ra­tion with those part­ners, includ­ing heat pump spe­cial­ists GEA and the Dutch gov­ern­ment, was essen­tial to get the Blender over the line.

We want this to be a blue­print and inspire that change for every­one

“Sup­pli­ers found it real­ly unusu­al to be asked if this was going to be your own pet project, how would you do it?” says Wake­ford. “That’s often where peo­ple are wait­ing to be giv­en the free­dom to go, ‘I’d do it like this’. Often, that’s where the gold­en nuggets came from.”

Added to that was the hur­dle of becom­ing a man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny. For the first time, the team had to tru­ly under­stand all the work pre­vi­ous­ly done by sup­pli­ers, as well as upskill exist­ing staff and hire for brand-new roles and teams.

They hope that the next com­pa­ny to fol­low in their foot­steps will not find it as hard, how­ev­er. Inno­cent is pro­duc­ing a white paper that will include “warts-and-all learn­ings and fail­ures”, O’Gorman says. “We want this to be a blue­print and inspire that change for every­one. So if com­peti­tors asked to come in, we have no issue with that – we’ve had loads of oth­er busi­ness­es already come in to have a look.”

In fact, if all com­pa­nies man­u­fac­tured in the same way, Inno­cent reck­ons it would cut 30% of their over­all ener­gy con­sump­tion.

Innocent and sustainability

Although the fac­to­ry is a big step for Inno­cen­t’s green efforts, the company’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty cre­den­tials have come under fire in recent years. It became a poster child for green­wash­ing when the UK’s Adver­tis­ing Stan­dards Author­i­ty (ASA) ruled that a 2021 TV advert about “fix­ing up the plan­et” was mis­lead­ing to con­sumers.

Its own­er­ship is also con­tro­ver­sial. Inno­cent was bought out by Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest plas­tic pol­luters, in 2013. For some, it’s an arrange­ment fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble with claims to eth­i­cal busi­ness.

Innocent’s team are keen to stress that the rela­tion­ship between the com­pa­nies is large­ly arms-length. How­ev­er, Coca-Cola did stump up the cash need­ed to build the Blender. Coke rep­re­sen­ta­tives have vis­it­ed the fac­to­ry more than once and Inno­cent hopes they will be able to feed learn­ings from it into their own man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es.

“This is their invest­ment in us,” O’Gorman says. “Almost a quar­ter of a bil­lion – it’s not cheap – because they want to see how you could build sus­tain­able man­u­fac­tur­ing… We get to keep our inde­pen­dence and be our fun, quirky selves, but we’ve got the sup­port of Coke to actu­al­ly make that hap­pen.”

It means a por­tion of Innocent’s jour­ney to car­bon neu­tral­i­ty rests on buy­ing car­bon off­sets, a con­tentious method. A Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion recent­ly found 90% of rain­for­est off­sets offered by one sup­pli­er, Ver­ra, did not remove any car­bon.

O’Gorman says the team worked hard to find a good off­set­ting part­ner (they opt­ed for South Pole, which is sep­a­rate to Ver­ra but uses that organisation’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion stan­dards). There are active dis­cus­sions going on about whether these schemes are the way for­ward for Inno­cent, she adds.

“Our argu­ment was always that we’d rather not sit and do noth­ing at all. A lot of decar­bon­i­sa­tion tar­gets are going to take time, so at least we can be invest­ing in nature in the short term. Some com­pa­nies say ‘well, I’m off­set­ting so I’ve done my job’ – we nev­er saw it like that.

“That’s the chal­lenge of work­ing in sus­tain­abil­i­ty, you think you’re doing the right thing and then every­one learns a bit more and reassess­es. There’s no rule­book.”

Rotterdam Port is an unlikely spot for a landmark green investment. The largest seaport in Europe stretches for miles in a drab maze of rusted drums, slag heaps and stacks of shipping containers. But on the far side of a scrubby field packed with seagulls pops a familiar halo logo.

It sits atop Innocent Drinks’ new €225m (£198m) factory, dubbed the Blender. Despite its unassuming setting, the factory is packed with technology aimed at making it one of the world’s first carbon-neutral, all-electric drinks factories. 

Innocent is a household name in the UK for its colourful, healthy smoothies and juices and quirky branding (its London HQ? Fruit Towers. CEO? Chief squeezer). But the company might be almost as well known for its ethos.