The Art of good taste at Fruit Towers -Innocent Drinks.

I recently attended an evening learning about the art of good taste hosted by Innocent Drinks at their offices at Fruit Towers. Fruit Towers is an amazing venue with lots of open plan places for the staff to think, eat, drink and work and get their creative juices flowing.

On arrival we were greeted and treated with lots of canapes and presented with our own uniquely created mocktail. We also had the opportunity to explore the amazing fruit towers with its open spaces, staff areas, kitchens, lego wall and interactive room. Its an amazing place to work.

After our tour we split up into groups and did some taste and smell challenges using our five senses; sight,smell,taste,touch and hearing. We tried different foods whilst taking note of the impact they have on our senses.

We each tried the Ishihara colour recognition test to test our colour vision as colour is very important part of food . After this we took part in a sensory training course, where we were presented with  five different samples and had to identify them  by describing the samples as either, sweet. sour ,salt, bitter and umami, Those who identified the samples correctly were awarded an innocent sensory training certificate.

The highlight of the evening was an interactive talk and hands on tasting session by the authors of The Flavour Bible Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg. We learnt about vegetarian trends in the US and how combining different foods with different spices give amazingly different results on your tastebuds.

Finally we were able to go into the Innocent kitchens and make our own fruit and veg smoothies in a smoothie making challenge. We were able to cycle our blenders to pulse our juices!! Very hard work indeed and not many of us realise the  process that goes into making a smoothie from sourcing the best ingredients to creating a perfectly balanced and eye appealing smoothie.

Did you know that innocent is celebrating the unique stories of devotion necessary to ensure only the best tasting fruit goes in to an innocent juice.

The farmers turn their mangoes by hand, every day for seven days, to make sure they are perfectly ripe and exceptionally juicy

By protecting their pears with a wall of icicles in winter, innocent can make sure the pears don’t frost overnight and grow big and juicy, ready to be blended in their apple, peach & pear juice.

Innocent takes the calyx off every single strawberry that they use in their innocent juices. (The calyx is the leafy green stalk that lots of other people just leave in.)

Innocent builds their pineapples a water bed so they don’t get bumped around or bruised. Bashed up pineapples don’t taste as fresh or pineappley, so it’s important to keep them comfy

AND FINALLY .......An innocent drink tastes good (crammed full of all that delicious fruit) which in turn does you some good. And the good keeps going: because innocent gives 10% of profits to charity, people around the world lead better lives as a result
I really enjoyed my evening and you can see a video of the event here.