farmer innovation fund

funding the farming of the future

At innocent, we’re big fans of fruit & veg. We’ve been blending it, juicing it and squashing it into bottles for over two decades, to help get its goodness into as many people as possible.   But however great fruit & veg is, it also makes up the biggest chunk of our carbon footprint – about 57% of our total emissions, to be specific. They come from growing it, transporting it to our Blender and getting it into drinker’s hands.  

We wouldn’t have any fruit & veg without the planet it grows on, so we want our carbon footprint to be as low as possible - starting with a 50% reduction of our scope 3 emissions by 2030. We’re doing all sorts of things to help us get there, including the Farmer Innovation Fund we launched back in 2021.  

It’s an annual pot of money that helps our suppliers keep growing fruit & veg long into the future. The fund will support them with the move to regenerative farming practices that improve and protect soil health, water resources, biodiversity and the climate. Since the fund is one of the most important ways we can lower the carbon in our supply chain, we’ll be putting up to £1 million into it in 2024. 

We’re excited to keep working alongside the farmers already involved, and even more excited to be on the lookout for more heroic growers to join the mission in the coming year.   

Find out more about how our past winners are using the fund to reduce the carbon emissions from their farms. 

grape expectations

This is Gonzalo, the CEO of Agrarias Manchegas, and his business consultant, Emilia. The Spanish farm has supplied grape juice to innocent for years, and sustainable farming has always been important to Gonzalo and his family. Now the Farmer Innovation Fund is helping them take sustainable farming practices into the future. They used their funding to buy solar panels to power their irrigation system, machinery (like a mulcher) equipment (like a monitoring station), and a fancy-multispectral and spraying drone duo. The money meant they could buy this handy stuff sooner and all at the same time. and now it’s working together as an ecosystem to make their farming more sustainable.

a triple win

Frutilight are the legends growing our pineapples in Costa Rica, and the Farmer Innovation Fund helped them run not one, not two, but three clever carbon-cutting projects: 

fancy fertiliser

They switched to a fancy, specially made fertiliser that uses nano-technology to give their soil the exact nutrients it needs. That means they’re reducing waste, since they’re using the right amount of fertiliser every time. 

bamboozling bamboo

They started growing bamboo in the unused parts of their farm, which improves the quality of their soil and removes more carbon in the atmosphere than your average tree (bamboo grows six times faster). Bamboozling.  

pineapple pallets

To top it all off, the pallets they use to package up and ship pineapple juice are now made from the bamboo they’ve been growing themselves instead of wood. That makes the transportation of their pineapples more sustainable than ever. 

the future's bright, the future's oranges

In 2021, we also funded some research by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) and the Fund for Citrus Protection (Fundecitrus). They’re the first people to try and get a better understanding of how much carbon can be absorbed by orange trees and wild areas of around 5,000 farms in Brazil.  

After measuring the carbon content in the leaves, branches, trunks and roots of trees, they've shown that one orange tree stores around 50kg of carbon. And by estimating carbon stocks in the living biomass and soil of about half a million hectares of land (that’s the same as half a million football fields), they’ve worked out that around 133 million tonnes of CO2 are stored by the farms in Brazil’s main orange-producing region.

So far, 314 different species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians have been spotted living in and around the farms. Around 85% of them were birds, 9% were mammals and 6% were reptiles and amphibians. That’s already a bustling neighbourhood, but they expect to see even more species as the experts keep monitoring.  

B a part of it

We're in good company. There are thousands of other businesses who are part of the B Corp movement, like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry's, TOMS and The Body Shop. Find out more about the movement and what you can do to get involved.

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things we do for people

We do lots of things all around the world to help support the communities we operate in (as well as giving 10% of our profits to charity). Find out a bit more about what we're doing to help out our fellow human beings.

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things we do for the planet

We're pretty big fans of our home: planet Earth. It's got dogs and funny things like chaise lounge's. Read a bit more about some stuff we're doing to look after it and leave things better than we find them.

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