Innocent drinks grew out of an entrepreneurial experiment at a London music festival ten years ago to a company that today generates an annual turnover of £113 million.

Fruit Towers, its headquarters, with picnic tables, bunting, greengrocer's turf and oversized plastic daisies, is part-village green, part-Magic Roundabout. The brand, which is expanding across Europe, looks just as at home in a school lunchbox as it would at Glastonbury Festival. The issue which preoccupies Richard Reed, the co-founder and his colleagues at innocent is, "can you profit from ethics? Can you find a slightly more responsible, evolved form of capitalism?"

In an interview for The Green Rush, Times Online's series about business and the environment, Mr Reed explores the idea of building a profitable business on principles.

The need to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues offers business "a brilliant opportunity", he says.

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• innocent podcast link

"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 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?"

Innocent's ethics underpin its business practice: from commitments to use only natural, sustainably sourced ingredients and to channel 10 per cent of annual profits to charity, to the 100 per cent recycled and recyclable bottles in which the drinks are sold, they are woven into the image of the brand. Mr Reed is used to the charge that the values are pursued as a marketing strategy.

"No, for us, it isn't a marketing strategy," he says. "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."

Mr Reed attributes the shift in corporate attitudes towards responsible business practice to the increasing awareness and engagement of employees with issues such as global warming.

"I think 15 years ago people started talking about corporate social responsibility and 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?"

As a teenager at the time of the head-turning "Hello Boys" Wonderbra advertising campaign, Mr Reed was caught trying to steal a copy of the advert, featuring Eva Herzigova, from a promotion in a department store in Huddersfield.

"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," he says.

Amid fears that the economic downturn will prompt consumers to abandon more ethically sound, responsibly sourced and produced products in favour of cheaper alternatives, Mr Reed argues that people need to keep the integrity about where they seek to economise and to remain aware of the wider impact that their purchases have.

"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."