Inside The Blender — Innocent Drinks' factory of the future

Times

19-07-2025

You don't normally call your dog Spot when you live in the Netherlands, but the robot dog at the high-tech Innocent smoothie factory in Rotterdam is not your average hound.
'Spot takes measurements like temperature and vibration and has an on-board camera,' said John McGowan, head of supply chain at Innocent. 'If there is a non-standard event, he communicates back.' The small robot, about the size of a terrier, 'replaces the human in many ways', he added.
Innocent, which opened a factory called The Blender in Rotterdam in 2021, aims to lead the way in both automation and sustainability. It champions green targets as good business sense and believes that other companies will follow its lead.
Its eco-friendly factory in Rotterdam may hold lessons for the wider food industry, which was the focus of a new UK government strategy published last week designed to improve access to healthy food. Ministers also want to develop 'more environmentally sustainable production methods' in the sector, which employs 4.2 million people in the UK.
Innocent Drinks was founded in Cambridge in 1998 and bought out by Coca-Cola in 2013, giving it the financial firepower for projects such as The Blender. While at least five other factories are cutting back or moving out of Rotterdam this year, citing high energy costs and new pollution limits, Innocent is ploughing ahead with a strategy to become carbon neutral by 2028. What this means, McGowan said, is building two new wind turbines and expanding its solar farm to meet its growing energy needs.
The Netherlands is one of Europe's most enthusiastic adopters of solar power and, no surprise given its historical association with windmills, has welcomed wind turbines. But with this switch to renewables comes a problem that Britain also faces: the Dutch grid is struggling to accommodate peaks of electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines, and some companies have to wait up to ten years for a connection.
'Electricity is a challenge, no doubt,' McGowan said. 'The infrastructure [too], which is unusual, given the developed nature of the Dutch economy. However, it is forcing people to be creative and to be more sustainable in their outlook. Many manufacturing sites today are trying to retro-design: this plant was built, state-of-the-art, as an electrical plant … We're at the cutting edge.'
In a £200 million and counting factory where the storage silo holds 250,000 litres of juice ready for blending, being at the cutting edge seems important. But during a good hour of walking around, I did not see a single blade. In fact, you would not even know it was a food factory until the packing room, where little bottles whizz around and the odd reject lands in a bucket.
There are apparently more machines than human beings, just 280, and those we see have hair nets and beard guards, well-scrubbed hands and no false nails. Sweden is being served today and instead of British bottles of Innocent's juice-based drinks with labels such as 'strawberries, bananas and apples', we watch 'Apelsinjuice med fruktkott' whipping along, off to the fully automated cold warehouse.
The factory has already won Breeam (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) sustainability certification and is aiming to go further, both for ethical reasons and business resilience.
'We're on a journey to complete carbon neutral, so we're making more investments in wind turbines,' McGowan said. 'Hopefully we'll be fully net neutral by at the latest 2028 … completely off the grid. And that's a sustainability goal as much as it is a business goal because we don't want to be in a situation where we're dependent on a government or an infrastructure.'
The site needs to run 24/7, he added: 'It's critical to the network, so it cannot come down. If this comes down, we lose millions in business, daily … Business continuity is essential.'
The Blender uses water-saving technology to clean pipes with air, and employs a complex system of electric heat pumps.
Maeve Lynch, site director, said: 'Electric pumps in themselves are not new technology, but for this application for manufacturing and at this level of temperature and pressure to generate the steam and the pressure that is required to keep the system running, it's quite a challenge. They have failed a number of times and we're probably on our third version now.'
Many of the juices come in cold so they need to be defrosted and then made sterile, meaning some parts of the factory are hot and steamy. Some of the heat pumps in the ammonia plant, Robert van der Linden, an engineer said, heat juices to 65 or 90 degrees for the pasteurisation process.
As with all of its technology, Innocent works with a partner: in this case, GEA, based in Dusseldorf, a major provider for the drinks industry, which supplied the tech for what it calls 'the world's first carbon-neutral juice factory'.
Despite a continuing expansion project, the site is remarkably clean. And there is huge attention to detail: the brooms and other cleaning equipment are colour-coded so that nobody can walk away with a different department's litter picker.
The factory is in a beautiful location, looking out to sea, on a 60-hectare business park dubbed the Rotterdam food hub. From here, Innocent serves the 18 countries where it sells its products. It's perfectly located for ingredient shipments: orange juice comes in from Brazil, mangoes from India and strawberries from Spain.
The fruit arrives ready pressed — orange juice, apple juice and banana pulp, for instance — to be blended according to the factory recipe. Incoming lorries are sustainable too, McGowan said, pointing out a 50-tonne electric lorry discharging its load after a 42-minute trip from the supplier.
'This whole area is here marked to be a food hub, and we have the ships coming in,' he says. 'So they basically come in from Brazil, and they deposit in very large tankers in a juice facility just at the port. And then we transport by electric truck out here.'
Unlike other port companies, Innocent says that it has not had issues with cocaine packed in among bananas — probably harder to do in a vat of juice — and they also do not receive pallets directly.
'The only issue we have, quite frankly and openly, is from time to time, particularly in the UK, we would have migrants on the shipment going into our warehouse, in Tilbury, Essex,' McGowan said. If stowaways get into the cargo, the whole shipment has to be destroyed, he said, to reduce the risk of contamination. 'We can't take the chance and we can't test for everything.'
Outside the factory, geese, other birds and wildlife cluster, including a sad-looking seagull sheltering against the outside of a loading bay. 'We've managed to find the right balance between protecting their site versus us,' Lynch said.
McGowan agreed: 'We look at the natural environment here. It just makes sense to go solar and in the country of windmills [to have] wind turbines.'
Clean power, robot dogs and giant heat pumps: other food producers may go green with envy.