If there's one thing that we like here at Fruit Towers, it's someone sending us mudcakes along with their CV. Yes, last week a lovely person who would quite like to work at innocent made a big effort and presented us with four of the finest cakes we'd ever seen. The fact that they were made of mud and grass meant that, technically speaking, we couldn't eat them. But they looked pretty amazing and stupid people (such as Richard and Dan) did consider eating them before realising that they were made of soil, leaves and other natural ingredients. Observe here.

Another recipe that we heard about last week didn't sound so good. It was sent to us by someone with a broken leg who wasn't moving about very much, and so was looking for convenient yet healthy snacks. Et voilà, cottage cheese and one of our smoothies in a bowl, all mixed up. If you have eaten anything worse involving one of our drinks, we'd love to hear about it - email catfoodisokifyouholdyournose@innocentdrinks.co.uk

Does anyone want to see a picture of Barney wearing a top hat? Great. And what about a picture of some people with our flowers? Well, it's all here.

Thanks to everyone who replied to the special question email we sent out a couple of weeks ago. Our server started doing emergency bleeps due to the strain of so many replies, but we've now been through all of your answers, made a pretty graph and selected 5 lucky people who now get drinks - well done to Kate, Stephanie, Kate, Julian and Vayia - your drinks will be on their way to you in the next couple of days.

It's not often that we have some brand new drinks to talk about, so we'll take a deep breath first...

breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out

...that's better. Now, onto these amazing new super smoothies. We made them because we figured that you're like us. You're healthy, you know what you should eat and drink to ensure a long and happy life, but sometimes the urge to eat fag sandwiches and drink pina coladas overpowers you. And after doing such things, you could do with being super kind to your body and its many workings.

So we decided to start making super smoothies. We've started off with two recipes - natural detox and natural vitamin C, both made with a certain principle in mind; namely, why not use natural ingredients that are rich in the desired nutrients, rather than adding synthetic vitamins to over-processed gloop? Why not indeed.

OK, now that we've told you about our new drinks, we move onto more pressing matters - our shoes. Not that they press, as we always make sure we get the right size. But like any workplace worth its salt, Fruit Towers is a hotbed of shoe-based comment and gossip, especially when someone gets a fancy new pair. So we thought we'd show you some of the new styles being sported this autumn, and give you a little game to play as well. Click here to join in.

New drinks, new shoes, new people - it's all go here at Fruit Towers. This week sees us officially welcome a couple of new people to innocent, and wave goodbye to another.

Gareth and Emma are our new friends. They've both been working here for a little while, but we finally managed to use subtle mind tricks and convince them that their future is fruit-based. Unfortunately, Elena, who came here to help us organise Fruitstock and has been here ever since, is immune to our psycho powers. She's leaving us for a bit of travelling and is then off to turn into a lawyer (there's a course you can do apparently). Here are some facts about all three of them:

PS If you fancy working here, check out the jobs page - there's a new position up there this week.

Our final story this week is about Jack the car crash man. Jack had previously contacted us about some free drinks, and offered us a conservatory and a lunch date as way of an exchange. Next thing we knew, we received a call from his wife Norma who told us he'd been involved in a car accident, and when he'd come to, all he wanted were some of our drinks, but he couldn't remember their name. After trying numerous other brands, Norma found us, and now all of his visitors bring him innocent drinks. Jack is now one of our most hallowed drinkers ever - nobody has ever had a car accident just to get hold of some of our drinks, and we commend Jack for his initiative, courage and persistence.

You'll be pleased to hear that he's on the mend now.

When you have new smoothies to get into the shops, it helps if you get out and about and tell people all about them. So, being a fairly literal bunch, we thought we would do exactly this. Hopping into our executive fleet of cow vans, we set forth across London and beyond last week to show shopkeepers and innocent drinkers our new super smoothies. And it went quite well - there are now a few more shops stocking our super things, we got to get out and taste life on the road, and we took some pictures, only three of which were fit for human consumption. The innocent autumn sales blitz continues apace this week - if you see us out and about, please stop us and beg a smoothie.

Last week was a busy week at Fruit Towers. Not only were we out with our new drinks, we were also putting on our best hats and nipping off to some awards things. The best award of the lot, and in fact our best award of the year, was at the Q Awards. These are purely product-based, so it's all about the drinks and not about dressing up vans to look like cows. Hence these are the ones we get most excited about. And for the second year running, we won the Best Soft Drink prize. Last year it was for our yoghurt, vanilla bean and honey thickie; this year our yoghurt, mangoes and coconuts thickie got the gong. Getting a bit serious for a moment, we are nothing if we don't make the best drinks possible. Lucy, Nikki, Lucy and Dani earned this for consistently coming up with the finest drinks in the world/Shepherds Bush, so we doff our caps to the four of them.

We also won Marketing Strategy of the Year at the National Business Awards 2003, so all in all a good week for our friends at the dry cleaners round the corner on Iffley Road, seeing as we had to get dolled up and everything.

OK, if you're still with us we'd like to introduce a couple of new people to you all. Ed is our man on the street, our eye on the world, our knight in a shining cow van. His job is to sell our drinks and be friends with all of the shopkeepers in London, apart from the ones who sell lengths of guttering and claw hammers as they don't tend to shift many smoothies, though Ed says that he has met some nice ironmongers in his time.

Then there's Hazel, who after a long hard search has become our Marketing Assistant. This means she'll basically run things whilst New Adam and Dan draw pencil crayon pictures of woolly hats. Hazel has a few strings to her bow...

• she has penned a novel with her best mate, and when she grows up she'd like to be a writer
• she's a devoted T-Rex fan, and goes to Marc Bolan's shrine quite often to shed a tear - once she left him her best conker
• she can do the splits both ways

We don't have a photo of the last fact yet, but we do have evidence of Hazel being wooed on her first day at Fruit Towers.

And finally, a quick round-up of some other things that have made us happy this week. One of these things was a Thea Gilmore concert. Thea is great, and she also likes our drinks, which makes her even better. Another good thing was getting our first ever Russian subscriber, who is called Natalia. We have fashioned a Russian welcome message that goes a bit like this (excuse our non-Cyrillic transliteration):

Prevyet Natalia. Mi ochen radi shto vi proyevile interess k nashey malenkaya compania. Mi nadeymsyah shto v ne doleykem bodyshem vi smozheti pokypat nashi smoothie v vashey stranye. C lybovyo, innocent . *

Finally, nobody got the answer to the matching-up the-shoes game right (click here for answers). Lots of you tried, but no prize. So to win the rollover, please tell us the Russian word for strawberry (stick it in the Subject line of an email sent to hello@innocentdrinks.co.uk)

* Hello Natalia. We're glad that you're interested in our little company. We hope that in the not too distant future, you will be able to buy our smoothies in your country. Love from innocent.

Luxembourg is a special little place. Not only is it the sixth-smallest country, but it's played host to "I Know What You Did Last Summer," "Highlander 4," "Blade 2" and the 1997 version of "An American Werewolf in Paris." Can you see a pattern emerging here? It also has more Michelin-starred restaurants per square mile (or per head of inhabitant) than any other country in the world. Obviously, things just got even better as innocent can now be found in "The English Shop" in Limpertsberg, Luxembourg City. We'd like to welcome them into the innocent family with open arms, not least because they apparently sell the best sausages in town. No ulterior motives there then.

We all like being at one with nature, and that isn't just when Dan G becomes a naturist on the weekends. At school we fondly recall doing charcoal rubbings of tree trunks, making pretty pictures out of leaves, and how sore your knuckles were after a good game of conkers. Well, news reached us last week of the lovely Mel who did indeed commune with nature on her recent holiday. She took herself off to Dartmoor to have a bit of quality time on her own, and saw things like "ponies, sheep, mushrooms, blackberries, leaves and lots of other things like moors, lanes and stone circles," all of which she took photos of. She kindly sent us in a very fetching picture of some cows, so look here and you can see a bit of virtual nature too.

We all get a bit excited when we get to meet new people, but even more so when they are well known. Last week, Lucy T and Dani went off to a function at the South African High Commission to celebrate the launch of Thandi fairtrade grapes. They had a bit of a natter to George Alagiah (he of BBC Six O'Clock News fame) and Adjoa Andoh (Collette from Casualty. The one who was married to Josh, then had a fling with dishy Simon, then it all went wrong and she left). Apparently George likes nothing better than to down one of our drinks before he reads the news, so now you know what helps to oil those dulcet tones of his.

Before we go, we should also point out we're looking for some more new people to join our ever-growing family at Fruit Towers, so there are lots of new jobs up here. So if there is anything that tickles your fancy, send your CV to Brontë with a covering letter telling her what you'd like to do and why you'd like to do it here at innocent.

*this week