Richard Reed, co-founder, innocent drinks

The world is so interconnected and we're facing such unimaginably complicated problems that we don't really yet know the solutions to, it’s definitely no one's fault and it's no one person's responsibility. Everyone's got to act in line with their, everyone's got to do what they can. Now I do think businesses, however, are in a unique position because they have unbelievable resources at their disposal: time, money, intellectual capital, systems, processes, people. Getting them engaged in some of the wider social issues I think is just a brilliant opportunity for business and one could argue something that business should be doing as well. My whole principle is this: business is about money, and anyone who says that it isn't is of course being naive or missing the point. We've got to make money because that's like a human being breathing, you need to make money, you need to make profit to stay in business, to sustain independence, to do all the things that we do. But can't we be about making money and something else? And so I think the opportunity for business is just to slightly widen its remit, to say this is the nature of the world in which we trade, this is the nature of the resources we have at our disposal, can't we use some of them, not all of them, just a little bit of them, to help, let's choose one problem, one thing that we're interested in, one thing that's relevant to our business system, and try and make that a little bit better.

I personally am an optimist; I think it's starting to happen. I heard this fantastic example recently of Microsoft in the Kosovan refugee crisis a few years ago. I met a woman who ran the NGO that dealt with all the refugees and she said some people from the local Microsoft office came down and said we don't know what we can do to help, but we really want to help. And so they spent a bit of time talking to the people that ran the NGO and they realised that there was a big database problem. You've got 200,000 displaced people, no way of proving who they are, can't get citizen papers to get back into their country that they've just been run out of. A few of these IT guys from Microsoft literally built tents in the refugee camps and spent overnight coding to build a little database, got everyone's details into this database, issued them with citizen papers, were actually at the borders allowing people to go back home. Now of course there's no money in Microsoft for that, but a tremendous sense of pride for the people in the Microsoft team, got to develop their skills further in terms of writing databases, so there definitely would have been commercial benefit for Microsoft - they wouldn't have sold more stuff directly, but they would have got a more engaged, more talented, more honed team. Plus they've had a fantastic contribution to a situation. So I love that, I love thinking business is just this human community with skills and tools and money and energy, what more can we do? Yes, we make money first but what can we do beyond that?

I think, fifteen years ago people started talking about corporate social responsibility and it was, it was thin. It was a marketing strategy or something that the chairman's wife had said we had to do and people didn't buy it. This time round, to me it feels like it's come from the grassroots up. It's come from the fact that everyone that works in business is also a citizen. We go and read the newspapers, we watch the news, we go and watch An Inconvenient Truth or whatever it is, we are aware that these things are starting to happen. How can you then go about your day job and not care about them? The great thing is you realise through your day job you can have a positive effect, you can work at taking carbon out of your supply chain, or you can work out what you can do to make the business run in a slightly more environmentally friendly manner, or help out your local community groups or things like that. People are wanting to do it because they're citizens in business whereas before it was businesspeople working out, is this a good angle?

People always ask, the ethical side of the business - is it a marketing strategy? Actually it isn't. It's come out of the way that I was brought up, and the way that Adam and Jon [Adam Balon and Jon Wright, co-founders of innocent] were brought up, used to organise jumble sales aged 11 to save the whales, my sister is a total earth mother hippy, and I used to work on a farm from the age of four, and so I've just got ingrained in me a deep-seated love of nature and community and just trying to make things a little bit better than when you find them. So, no, for us it isn't a marketing strategy. But I would have no problem if it was. Because my whole thing is, I care less about the motivation, I care more about the end impact. You know, the climate doesn't care about the motivation; the climate cares about whether there's more or less carbon dioxide going in. So, I'm not down on people who have it as a marketing strategy. I'm down on people who fake it, I'm really down on that, but they will get found out. We live in a digital, connected world now. You get busted. Maybe not today but certainly tomorrow. So if you're faking it, you'll get busted so, I think those people will get taken care of. But the one thing I would say is I don't think it sells more products. This is the thing. We don't do it as a marketing strategy, we do it because it's our business and it's what we care about. If we were doing it as a marketing strategy I would still be OK with it as long as we were delivering on it. But it doesn't sell the products.

I don't have to justify it commercially the things that we do because it's our business and we can do it how we want. We want to do it this way. That's OK for us. But loads of people work in businesses where they do have to build a business case and that is much harder for them, I accept that we're very lucky at innocent to be able to call it how we see it. If I had to come up with a commercial reason why, it is not really about people buying more products, it is not really about retailers stocking you more, it is about the fact that you will keep the most bright, the most talented, the most committed people engaged and working hard in your business for longer. And that has a huge commercial benefit indirectly because winning in business is only about who’s got the smartest people and how aligned and focused are they.

A business will kick like hell to avoid government legislation and red tape and all that type of stuff, but you just see how quickly a business responds to consumer pressure. It is democracy. Marketing is basically just the business arm of democracy.

Consumers absolutely have the power, we all have the power, we have to start recognising that, that every time we make a purchase, we are voting. And we've got to be clear, that in the same way that we would place a vote for our political party, we'd probably research it, do we like what they stand for, do we like their track record, are they setting out a set of things which is right and appropriate for the space in which they operate. I think these days, consumers because of the power that we have and the problems that are going on we have to have a similar point of view when we vote with our pounds as well.

I once got caught stealing from a shop in Huddersfield when I was a kid. It was a picture of a woman in a bra, bit naughty. And my dad happened to be walking past just at the point where I'd been nabbed by the store manager, and I thought I was going to get so told off by my dad for trying to steal this thing, and my dad just said to me, "it's up to you how you price your own integrity. Now if your integrity was to sell for a piece of cardboard with a picture of a woman on it that's your decision, but I think you should price your integrity higher than that." And I think we've got to think about that with our consumer purchases. There may be that thing that is that little bit 10 per cent cheaper, maybe it's a bit more shoddily made, maybe the quality's not quite as good, maybe it's not as good for you or maybe it's not as good for the people that work in the factory or in the field or whatever. Let's just be conscious of what we're spending our money on. I know times are going to be hard and people are going to need to economise but let's keep the integrity about what we're making those economies to. We've got to always be thinking about our own wider impact, because everything you and I do, everything we buy, everything we drive, everything we see, everything has an impact, and our job is to try and make it a positive one rather than a negative one. And I think perversely when times get hard this is when we need to keep to our principles. I've always been brought up with the belief that principles aren't principles till they cost you something.