Sweet Converse of an Innocent (Innocent Smoothies)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Innocent Smoothies
Date:	19/12/03 (473 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pure fruit, Taste scrumptious, Gosh-darned good for you!

Disadvantages: Price, Price again, And price again

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BOGOF

How could I resist? Innocent Smoothies were on offer at Londis at two for the price of one. As the usual price is £1.75 for a 250ml bottle, you can see it was a bargain.

Innocent Smoothies rock. They are delicious. They are lip-smackingly good. They are sweet, but not synthetically so. They are tart, but not eye-wateringly so. They are, obviously, smooth, but not blandly so. Each flavour is a blend of pure fruit and fruit juices - no sugar, no sweetener, no concentrates, and no preservatives. An Innocent Smoothie is, simply, lots and lots of lovely, lovely fruit. They're all centred on a basic mix of apples, oranges and bananas, but each variety has a carefully chosen mix of other fruit. These extra ingredients provide the strongest flavours in each smoothie. My favourite is the cranberry and raspberry, which has that wonderful raspberry mix of sweet and sharp, followed by a palate-cleansing after kick of cranberry. It's wonderful. And each tiny, 250ml bottle contains the following:

50 crushed cranberries
11 crushed raspberries
½ crushed banana
2 pressed apples
dash freshly squeezed orange juice

You know, that all adds up to three quarters of a pound of fresh fruit. That's a lot of fruit. You can't really taste those base ingredients - the banana, the apple, the orange. The overwhelming flavour and smell comes from the cranberries and raspberries. I'd bought four smoothies; two of the cranberry and raspberry, and two of the seasonal smoothie, currently cherry and strawberry. This was sweeter, less tart, as you'd expect from the mix, but equally flavoursome and refreshing. Both are excellent thirst-quenchers. I drank two before the children got home from school, which was lucky, because the other two lasted nano-seconds. These Innocent drinks are sophisticated enough to appeal to an adult palate, but sweet, and pretty, enough to be at least as attractive to a chil
d. One smoothie, apparently, contains one and a half times your daily requirement of Vitamin C. That single bottle also holds every bit of the fruit dieticians recommend that you eat each day. Good, eh? Especially when they taste so divine!

And for those of you who are interested in such things, Innocent are a nice bunch of people. They have a quirky little home in cyberspace at www.innocentdrinks.co.uk. It's very informative and it's also very open about buying practices, business ethos and suchlike. Just having a browse about it earlier made me feel as though Innocent is the kind of honest company I'm happy to give money to. I'd gone to see what they had to say about how they buy their fruit and whether they use Fair Trade suppliers. They don't. But there's a section in their FAQ which sets out their buying policy and business ethics. The website also told me that the plastic bottle the Innocent Smoothie comes in is made from recycled material. This is unusual and, in my opinion, excellent. But this is my opinion, not an advert, so if you want to find out more about Innocent, go and look at the site.

Clearly a luxury product, you can see Innocent Smoothies are expensive. £1.75 a throw is more than I'd pay regularly for any bottled drink, no matter how good or how healthy it is. At home we make smoothies and milkshakes often. How hard is it to put some fruit and some juice into a blender? There's always fruit in the house and growing in the garden to make them with. And they certainly don't cost £1.75 per person. However, it has to be said that the Innocent recipes work fantastically well. They taste nicer than the thrown-together, but still yumptious Murphy efforts. It's true. The cheapest I can find them - apart from that super, but finished, Londis offer - is £1.69 at Tesco Metro. This compares to a P & J Monster Smoothie, another premium product, at £1.19. Cheaper still is the Tesco Finest Smoothie at 99
p. Neither of these tastes quite as luxurious as the Innocent one, though. Also, the P & J Smoothie is made from juice concentrates and the Tesco Smoothie contains sugar. So for me, Innocent Smoothies are a premium product, but they are good value for money. You can find them at Sainsbury, Waitrose, Tesco Metro and Londis, among other, smaller stores.

I think they're worth buying for my family as the occasional treat. There aren't many products on the supermarket shelf which actually taste nicer than their home-made equivalents, and Innocent Smoothies are one of the few. Neither are there many products on the supermarket shelf made by companies I'm happy to give money to, and Innocent is one of the few. If you're the kind of person who struggles to make their five portions of fruit and vegetables per day, then they are certainly worth drinking on a regular basis, despite the expense. Bear in mind when you buy them that although they're lightly pasteurised, you will need to keep them in the fridge, they do have a shelf-life and you should drink them within a day of opening them.

That, frankly, shouldn't be a chore.

Summary: