Spring is here. Almost.

As much as we're all enjoying wearing our stripy scarves (fashionably knotted at the front of course), we're a bit bored of winter and feel it's time for it to move on and make someone else cold. So in a bid to get the Spring ball rolling, we've launched our new seasonal smoothie; the exotic lychees and passionfruits. An old favourite from last Spring, it will give you a taster of the nicer weather that is hopefully on the horizon. And in the meantime, may we recommend thermal underwear, jogging on the spot, and as much working from home as you can get away with.

To avoid running around the 24 hour garage on Sunday morning trying to decide which she'd prefer, the after eights or the wilted pot plant, we thought we'd take this opportunity to remind you that it's Mothers' Day this weekend. And in honour of the special occasion we're having another competition. Please email us an original four line poem dedicated to your mum, and the best 3 will win some smoothies and a nice posy of flowers. The closing date is 5pm on Wednesday 2nd March. And please remember to include your mum's full address and phone number on your entry as we'll send the prizes directly to them. Send your entries to yourmum@innocentdrinks.co.uk.

Sans berries? Then go to Sainsbury's.*

From this Wednesday Sainsbury's will be running a promotion on our big 1 litre cartons, with all recipes being half price. So it's finally time to bin that jar of extra hot mustard you bought from the farmers' market back in '94 - you're going to need all the fridge space you can get. Far too big to fit in Jamie Oliver's helmet, each carton contains over 2 pounds of fresh fruit and nothing else. Pukka.

See, we really do spend all our money on the fruit.

A couple of weeks ago, Dan and his mate Ed popped round the corner to Gunnersbury Park and shot our first ever TV ad. It will be shown in the granada region over the next couple of weeks, but you can also see it at http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/our_advert.mpg . We know we've just missed the Oscars, but apparently the Best Job Of Keeping Curious Labrador Out Of Shot category was excluded from this year's ceremony anyway. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it, so please drop us an email at pointsofview@innocentdrinks.co.uk

Help Wanted

We currently have more than 10 job vacancies here at Fruit Towers. So if you fancy coming and joining us, visit http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/jobs and see if there's anything that takes your fancy.

* désolé

Hello

We hope you found love this Valentine's Day. If you didn't, we hope you found something else nice, like an antique diamond brooch or a briefcase full of unmarked one hundred dollar bills.

Don't call it a comeback

Every now and then one of our recipes touches people's lives, and when we stop making it we end up getting lots of emails from people who are a bit angry with us for taking it away from them. Yoghurt, bananas and cinnamon is one such recipe. We originally made it for a limited period a couple of years ago, but by popular demand we've brought it back as our 'guest thickie recipe' for the next couple of months. We missed you big guy - we're glad you came back, even if it was only for the biscuits.

Some facts about this guest thickie recipe:

• Cinnamon has long been used in Chinese medicine to settle a dodgy stomach.
• All of our bananas are hand-peeled by people's hands.
• The honey that makes this thickie sweet comes from bees who flap their wings 11,400 times per second. That's really fast.

The Revenge of Second Biggest Week Ever

There's big and then there's big. And then there's second biggest as well. We're not ones for showing off but, well, it's time to have a bit of a show off. Last week we made the second biggest amount of nice drinks that we've ever made. We delivered the second biggest amount of smoothies that we've ever delivered to the shops. Which all means that you drank the second biggest/largest amount of smoothies and thickies in the history of innocent drinks. Admittedly, it's not a massively long history, but thanks for making everything so big anyway.

Right: our drinks are quite big

Valentine's poems

It might be a bit late now, but we'd like to share some Valentine's poems with you; specifically, the poems that won our competition last week. If you like the look of any of them, why not nick it, send it to your lover and pass it off as your own?

Strawberries are red,
Pineapples are bobbly,
When you wave your banana,
It makes my legs wobbly.
By Rich

My Robin, my hubby, tall and thin, never chubby,
I open my heart on this Valentine's Day, to give you a message, just wanted to say,
I adore you my dear but your presents just stink,
Please buy me a crate of my innocent drink.
By Ang

The tempting taste of passion fruits and mango,
A beautiful pairing, a divine fruit tango,
Say you'll be mine, or I shan't get a snog,
On Valentine's Day, just a card 'from the dog'.
By Claire

PS if you didn't get a card, try dating an elephant.

Did you know that you will grow about 2 million hairs on your head during your lifetime, as long as you wash it now and then, avoid crazy pink hair dye and eat your greens?

Going Dutch

It's full steam ahead in Holland. Not content with setting up Fruit Towers in Amsterdam, getting married and having fairly unpronounceable names, our men in the lowlands have also managed to get our drinks into some very swish places called Café B, located inside nice department stores called Bijenkorf (http://www.bijenkorf.nl) in the following places - Breda, Groningen, Den Bosch, Amsterdam, Enschede, Maastricht, Eindhoven and The Hague. And as of this week we'll also be available at all food and drink outlets inside the RAI in Amsterdam (a rather large exhibition centre from what we can gather). Het uitstekendst (this means 'most excellent' in Dutch).

The kids are alright

We love kids here at innocent, mainly because most of us used to be kids. We also like the fact that they are inquisitive, lovable and quite easy to pop into your handbag if you're nipping down to the shops. Anyway, last week our Barney and his wife Sophie had a baby. She's called Molly Bo and you can see a picture of Barney with her over there. Sweet. Of course, once your baby has grown up a bit, you might want to think about giving him/her some healthy drinks. Our Jerome and his saintly daughter have worked out how to do this by using an ordinary household teat and one of our smoothies (see picture).

Paper talk

The grown ups amongst you may occasionally take a look at the pages of the Daily Telegraph, best known for its difficult crossword and tradition of fair and reasoned comment. Last week they printed an article about the amount of sugar in various different sorts of soft drinks. We have had a few phone calls from people just wanting to check if we ever added sugar to our smoothies (the article made it sound like we might).
So just to clarify:

- innocent smoothies are made of fruit, fresh juices and absolutely nothing else.

As the clever ones among you may already know, fruit naturally contains a fruit sugar also known as fructose. So, if you eat an apple you are also eating the natural sugars that exist inside it. We spoke to one of the UK's top nutritionists, Professor Millward and he said this:

"Because innocent smoothies are made from whole crushed fruit and pure fruit juice with no added water or sugar, they contain all the nutrients of the fruit from which they are made and nothing else. This means that they contain fruit sugars as well all the antioxidants, phytoprotectants, vitamins and minerals that are essential to a healthy balanced diet."

So there you have it - consuming fruit is still the best thing you can do for your health apart from giving up the fags.

Love it

It's Valentine's Day next Monday. So we thought we'd try to help out a bit,seeing as it's sometimes a bit of a hassle to find the perfect gift for your lover. You see, in our recipe book there's a drink called Love's Young Dream. It's a champagne cocktail and will definitely make everyone fancy you. What's more, we're willing to send out three special Valentine's kits (champagne, ingredients for the drink and a recipe book) to the three people who can write us the best four line love poem (no rude words please).

Please send your work to hotlove@innocentdrinks.co.uk by the end of Wednesday 9 February (we'll have to send you your prize before the weekend) and we'll stick the best ones up on the site next Monday.

Pop life

Being a pop star is tough. Not only do you have to remember the words to songs, but sometimes you are even denied the chance to enjoy your favourite crushed fruit beverage. Which is exactly what happened to Darius whilst he was visiting BBC Manchester last week. Our sources tell us that the big guy was a bit upset to find the canteen fridge bereft of our smoothies, but luckily for him an emergency delivery was sorted and Darius's thirst was thus slaked. Phew.

It's happening

Groundhog Day is this Wednesday. More news at http://www.groundhog.org

Your mum

We love our mums as if they were our own mums. Which, luckily for us, they are. In fact, we love them so much that we thought it was about time we invited them into Fruit Towers so that they could see what we get up to during the day. So they all popped in for the day last Thursday and to be honest, we think it went pretty well. They came and ran their mum fingers along our desks. Not much dust there. They ate lunch with us and we all managed to clear our plates. And then we went outside and did the hokey-cokey (see picture). No smacked bums, no tears and no showing off in front of our mums. Perfect. And the best thing is that now they've gone back home, we can start swearing and smoking fags again. Brilliant.

It's happening again

Groundhog Day is this Wednesday. More news at http://www.groundhog.org

The worst day ever

If you can remember back as far as last Monday, you'll remember that it was supposed to be the worst day ever. We asked you to let us know if indeed Monday 24 January was a terrible day for you, and here are our three favourites, if you can have favourites in this case:

• Janey, who spilt yoghurt all down herself, lost her purse, broke her iPod, pulled a hamstring whilst out jogging. Oh, and the printer at work broke so she couldn't print out a big report which made her boss have a go at her.
• Geoff, whose cat pooed on the kitchen floor. This was only the tip of Geoff's misery iceberg, but we can't tell you anymore as it'll make you cry.
• Ruth, who was sitting on the loo just as the window cleaner popped up his ladder to clean the bathroom window.

It's happening again again

Groundhog Day is this Wednesday. More news at http://www.groundhog.org