Building supply chain resilience with innocent drinks
Case study
Background
Innocent Drinks sources ingredients from suppliers around the world, including significant sourcing bases in India and Brazil. More than half of innocent’s carbon footprint comes from these ingredients, making supply chain resilience central to its sustainability strategy, which includes a target to cut scope 3 emissions per litre by 50% by 2030 against a 2019 baseline.
In 2022, three internal champions at innocent began questioning whether carbon offsetting still made sense as the primary way of meeting the business’carbon reduction and sustainability targets. The question they brought to Impatience Earth was simple: offsetting might help meet emissions targets, but did it build resilience against climate shocks for suppliers, the business, or consumers? And if offsetting was only ever part of the answer, what else needed to be built alongside it?
The learning sprint
Impatience Earth curated a learning journey for the innocent team, delivered across two intensive days. Sessions covered the benefits and limitations of carbon offsetting, regenerative agriculture in the geographies innocent sources from most heavily, and the principles of climate justice as they apply to agriculture. A final session brought in one of the UK’s biggest retailers, giving the team a peer’s perspective on the same transition.
Three to four strategy sessions followed over the next few months; we worked on distilling the learning into a series of hypotheses innocent could test (such as what it would take for a bottle of orange juice to be low carbon, high on biodiversity and centred on fair livelihoods), supporting the innocent team with bringing the board on board, and helping think through the structuring of the financial and non financial support needed to build more climate resilient supply chains The full process, from learning journey to board presentation, took around eight to nine months.
Blending the learning into funding
Rather than create something new, the work fed into an existing mechanism: innocent’s Farmer Innovation Fund, previously running on a modest annual grant pot. The strategy work led to a relaunch at a substantially larger scale, with the first enhanced round offering £1 million in grants to innocent farmers and suppliers, and a new external advisory board supporting governance and ongoing education for innocent’s procurement and supplier relationship teams. The fund is now in its third year.
Prior to the launch of the first round of funding Impatience Earthran stakeholder interviews with previous grantees to understand what had worked and where the application itself created barriers, worked with innocent to redesign the application process to be fairer, and recruited the external advisory board members
A second learning journey followed, focused on scaling the fund. Sessions moved to climate resilience and adaptation finance, exploring what a “philanthropy plus” model might look like and whether tools such as insurance or anticipatory funding should sit alongside grants. This led innocent seeding the idea for Impatience Earth to write a report on blended finance, which became our much-used Regen Ag Guide.
Impatience Earth worked as a critical friend with Innocent’s board, taking a role the internal team could not easily take on itself and helping to articulate to leadership the climate pressures the business needed to respond to.
Impact to date
Over three years, innocent has moved around £3 million through the Farmer Innovation Fund, taken part in peer learning with other corporates, and proudly promoted the work. The team has ambitions for the fund to act as a central vehicle for innocent’s wider sustainability strategy, and the work is a great example of “philanthropy plus” underway.
One recent shift illustrates the change in the company’s thinking. Innocent has partnered with a supplier on a strawberry project in Spain, co-funding the work directly rather than investing alone, on the basis that a shared supplier is likely already supplying other buyers, and resilience here has system-wide benefits.
Lessons learned
- Much of this work depends on the drive of the individual pushing it forward internally, so staff changes can mean a period of retraining and re-explanation.
- Getting boards to commit to long-term investment with limited early returns, particularly when margins are tight elsewhere in the business, remains challenging.
- Board-level engagement and education from the outset is crucial to unblock the above.
Impatience Earth measures success partly by its own eventual redundancy: when a client has internalised the approach and no longer needs an external partner to hold the line, the job has been done.
Innocent is continuing the review, clarify and recommend process, working towards a fund that can act as the vehicle for meeting its scope 3 targets and a reference point for other sustainability initiatives across the business.