Hello. The sun is out, the sky is blue, there's not a cloud to spoil the view, but it's raining, raining in my heart. All true, apart from the raining bit. We're actually feeling quite chipper today.

The wave of the future

Blogging is where it's at. The cool kids have been blogging for years and even people born in 1899 have started posting stuff on the web. In case you didn't know, we too have a blog. It's a bit like our news, except we post things there every day, as and when we think of it, instead of waiting for Wednesday lunchtime. We thought we'd share some special recent moments from the world of our blog with you:

Feel free to post comments, suggest topics that we should post about and all of that stuff. We'd love you to get involved.

Our favourite dish

We're hard at work coming up with new recipes, including a new smoothie of the month that should appear next week. Meanwhile, we spotted this on a flipchart outside the development kitchen. It would seem that a herring and anchovy smoothie is on the cards. Be warned.

Content providers of the week

Thank you to Emma and Tom for sending us extensive photo highlights of their quest to find a bird to nest in their homemade innocent bird house, made from the box that our kids smoothies come in. See their handiwork here, and also on the magical innocent pinboard.

Good Energy

We don't make a habit of trying to flog you other people's stuff but this one's a bit different. Our friends at Good Energy are the only UK company that supplies only 100% renewable electricity - "many other companies offer a 'Green Tariff', but no one else obtains all of the electricity they supply from renewable sources." What's more, they've said that for every one of you that signs up using this link, they'll donate £10 to the innocent foundation. Worth clicking.

And finally...

P.S.
These folks won Ecover stuff in last week's competition. Boxes full of good clean fun should be with you later this week - Sarah, Bridget, Katie, Joanne, Jill, Sandra, John, Jan, 'E' and Andrew.

Hello. There is some smart environmental stuff in this week's news, along with a big bus and some classy pop music. Enjoy.

Make your kids famous

We're going to be making a TV advert for our kids smoothies very soon, and we thought we'd ask you if you knew of any smart kids who might like to be in it. We need a boy or a girl, aged about 9-10, who is natural, fresh-faced and perhaps slightly cheeky (but without any stage school affectations - no Mini-Pops). The prize awaiting the winner is a trip to somewhere nice to make the advert (with a parent/guardian, of course) plus a year's supply of smoothies, and we're looking to film very soon, in the week commencing 2nd April, so you'll need to be available to travel during that week.

Send photos of our future stars to hello@innocentdrinks.co.uk and put 'TV star' in the 'Subject' box. Stick your contact details and your kid's details (name/age) in the email too, and send the email to us by midday on Friday 23rd March. Good luck.

Our carbon footprint

Here's an exciting thing...we've worked out the carbon footprint of our mangoes and passion fruits smoothie - it's 294 grams. It's part of a big project we've been working on with the Carbon Trust to measure the impact of our business from field to store. We have a business mantra to leave the planet a little bit better than we found it, so we want to be the lowest carbon business we can be. Footprints for all our smoothies to follow soon...

France got big

No need to waffle on about this one too much. Put simply, we are happy to announce that our big one litre cartons are available in France as of right now. They're going to be on shelves in Monop' and  Monoprix stores nationally. And we've got posh new French packaging to boot. This makes us very 'appy.

Pop news

Now it's time for a bit of frivolous pop chat. The more fashionable among you will know that the Arcade Fire are a very hip and 'now' group, who have just released their second album 'Neon Bible'. They're also big fans of our drinks, which we found out after they requested our drinks and our presence backstage at a recent London show. (Wo)Manfully, we rose to the challenge and were honoured to be in their presence. They put on an amazing show. Read more about them in this recent interview.

Dirrrrrrrrrrty

OK, so we're not saying you're filthy or anything, but you could probably do with a bit of a scrub. Here to help you are the nice people from Ecover, who gave us a ring last week and asked us if they thought you might like to win some of their stuff. We said that we thought you might, so they put together a web competition thing. That's how these things work. All you have to do is click here (this link was only available to family members), enter a couple of details and then sit back to see if you've won some excellently ecological washing stuff. Good luck.

Josh and his rocket

Josh sent us this picture recently. He told us about how he grows rocket in old innocent kids cartons. So we asked him to come in to visit us. He did. Smart kid.

And finally...

Hello there. This week, by popular demand, we bring you more Shilpee, more bacon, more pinboard and the magic van. Exciting.

Dr Shilpee's nutritional delights

It's the news you've been waiting for. Dr Shilpee finally has her own bit on our website, where she tackles nutritional issues head on, without a crash helmet. That's how tough she is. For those of you who don't know, Dr Shilpee is our resident nutritional expert, and we thought we'd ask her to expand upon the nutritional benefits of drinking our smoothies. Her first few pages are here, and she’s going to be adding to them throughout the year. Bet you can’t wait.

Up up and away

It's about this time of year that you might be thinking about booking 2 weeks in Fuengirola, so we thought we'd get our act sorted out vis a vis airports. So if you're in need of a smoothie, you'll find our smoothies in Wetherspoons at Heathrow and Gatwick (selling like the clappers apparently), and also in Amsterdam and Copenhagen airports, if you happen to be passing. Also, Daniel in Dublin tells us that Gulf Air is serving glasses of our detox recipe on flights from Dublin to Bahrain, at the airline's request. We get around.

The pinboard returns

Week one of the pinboard has been very good indeed. People have posted a whole bunch of stuff - pictures of a baby wearing a nappy made from one of our cartons, the Mona Lisa (innocent style), smoothies on a fence, innocent pancakes and an excellent innocent lunchbox. Go and have a look for yourself here. Drinks will be sent to the following people, who posted stuff up there last week - Hayley, Joy, Kate, Gillian, June, Shaun, Christine, Florence, Luke and Catherine.

And finally...

A big thank you to those of you who stuck with us through February. Boy, was it a quiet news month. But we've turned a corner; it's March, it's spring and some stuff has happened...

March of the blendings

Yes we can finally stop cursing that day back in November when we left our gloves in that taxi – winter is over. Longer evenings, gambolling lambs, flowering flowers, frogs on lily pads, birds building nests and lots of other clichés we just looked up on the internet. The onset of March also means we’ve got a new smoothie of the month for you – fragrant lychees mixed with juicy Costa Rican passion fruits. Spring in a bottle. In the shops from today.

Show and tell

For years we’ve collected all the nice letters, photos, drawings and other stuff you’ve sent in. They’re all proudly on display on a wall in our office. Well, we thought we could no longer keep all this good stuff to ourselves, so we’ve made a new page on our website where we can show some of it off and you can upload more of it if you like. It’s hidden on our site at the moment but you can click here to have a sneak preview. To get the ball rolling we’ll be picking the 10 best things uploaded this week and sending the contributors a case of drinks each. Go create.

Hound couture

Those of you who’ve been reading our newsletter for a while will know we’re quite partial to the odd photo of a dog (or cat) wearing something smart. So we were happier than a Labrador in a fedora when we were sent these photos by the owners of ‘Sparky’s Delicatessen en Dog Fashion’ shop in Utrecht. Here the avant-garde Sparky is modelling two looks; sporty luxe-glam and baroque urban utility. He is so versatile.

We're with the band

Last year we held a talent search contest to find a great unsigned band to play at our summer festival. The eventual joint winners were the fetching 3 piece musical ensemble, Scouting for Girls. They’ve had a special place in our hearts ever since so we were very pleased to hear that the boys have just been signed by big record label Epic/Sony BMG. Congratulations to Roy (vocals, piano, looks), Greg (bass, vocals, hair) and Pete (drums, vocals, drums) – we’re looking forward to seeing you in HMV soon.

And finally...