innocence
October 4th, 2007There’s been a whole load of Stuff in the news lately about the smoothie company innocent. Here’s an example, from the Guardian, and here for the sake of fairness is innocent’s blog page about the whole affair.
Personally, I think people should get off their backs. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about innocent lately and that seems a bit harsh for a company who sell healthy drinks made of nothing but ethically-sourced fruit, present a friendly image, try to be green without pretending to be “carbon neutral” (as if anyone can honestly claim to have no environmental impact at all), and run a charity which receives 10% of their profits. Once, they mailed me a book of smoothie recipes, so I didn’t have to buy their expensive drinks any more. They made a rather dubious claim in their advert, but it’s a claim that many, many people have made of late, usually for far worse foods than bottled fruit. People have, I assume, latched onto this because they love a good “oh look they said they were so innocent and it turns out they’re big fat liars” story. The fact that innocent use ethical traders, keep their emissions low, give to charity, present a friendly image and make a healthy product somehow makes them worse. Well, no. It makes them better. They’ve done one thing wrong and about a hundred things right. So go and pick on someone who deserves it.
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4 Responses to “innocence”
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October 5th, 2007 at 00:17
These ’superfoods’ smoothies with their ‘detoxifying’ properties do tarnish innocent’s image a bit in my eyes; they always seemed to trade on making simple drinks just made from fruit and talking about them without trying to dress it up. It’s obviously going to appeal mostly to a certain section of society, but it’s not something anyone will object to. This new angle, with the nutritionist pseudoscience and “comes from a tree, not a laboratory” strapline smacks of pandering. Still, one bad apple need not spoil the smoothie (see what I did there?!) and they still seem like basically a good buch, even if it pleases me to imagine they’re a front for an evil mastermind out to conquer the world.
October 5th, 2007 at 09:43
I have gained further insight into said mastermind’s plan. Apparently Innocent sponsor/run a music festival in London. I suspect that with the aid of some of the “natural” compounds found in the drink, combined with subliminal messages at the music festival they are creating a vast drone army.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:17
Well, yes, it is pandering, and I remember being more than a bit disappointed the first time I saw one of their smoothies in its “superfoods” packaging. innocent jumped right aboard the unsubstantiated antioxidants-are-terrific bandwagon and they went about it the wrong way — had they simply stated that their product was high in antioxidants and let the other companies’ marketing departments sell the supposed benefits for them, then that would have been fine.
(There’s always the chance that they are even the victims of the antioxidants nonsense rather than the perpetrators. It depends how much you trust Hanlon’s Razor to determine the truth.)
But however you look at it, innocent didn’t start the antioxidant bandwagon going and they didn’t use it to sell anything that wasn’t basically good for you. I think they’re taking a totally disproportionate amount of flak from the public at the moment is all.
October 8th, 2007 at 21:43
[...] that they’re happy to promote any old nonsense as science if they think it will make money. But I’m not willing to write off a company just for that, so let’s see what else they [...]