Ribena - fruit juice soft drinks.

It’s breakfast time down on the Ribena farm and our stomachs are rumbling… Time to whip up a tasty Ribena-flavoured breakfast smoothie!

The Ribena Team will be sharing our love of blackcurrants with you over the coming months by bringing you lots of tips, recipes and info on our favourite little fruit.

But now, to make your breakfast smoothie you will need:

•    30g fresh or frozen blackcurrants (make sure they are thawed)
•    80ml natural yoghurt
•    75ml Ribena Blackcurrant squash
•    2 teaspoons mashed mango
•    10ml honey
•    10g mixed spelt flakes / oats (5g each type, crushed to a coarse sawdust texture)

Press the blackcurrants through a sieve and add the juice to all the other ingredients apart from the grains. Whizz together and add your oats or spelt at the end.

Finally, enjoy!

Make sure you let us how know how your recipes turn out if you give them a go, by dropping us a line in the comments section.

For some more recipe inspiration, why not visit our friends at The Blackcurrant Foundation.

The berry bushes that grow the blackcurrants for Ribena go through many different stages throughout their lives; from being first planted and looked after in nursery, to being harvested each year, through to stopping producing berries around the age of 12.

Have a read about their life on a Ribena blackcurrant farm:

1.    A strong twig between 7cm and 9cm is cut from a blackcurrant bush which is protected from plant pests and disease in a special nursery, and planted between October and March.

2.    Year 1- the cutting produces some small shoots. At the end of the first season, the small shoots are cut off

3.    Year 2 – the plant grows lots of strong shoots

4.    Year 3 – the shoots produced last year bear fruit for the first time and the bush grows more branches that will bear fruit the following year.

5.    Between the age of four and eight years, the bush grows its biggest yield. Per acre of bushes, between three to five tons of blackcurrants are harvested each year! An average bush can keep producing blackcurrants for 12 years.

6.    From its leaves falling in October and until March, the blackcurrant bush remains dormant.

7.    As the buds start to grow in the spring, frost protection measures make sure the buds are not damaged by the frost.

8.    Each April/May, the bushes flower. After the flowers are fertilised by insects, green berries form, which turn black over three weeks. These are then harvested between July and August.

9.    Throughout its life, a bush is looked after by being pruned, fed and kept healthy before being carefully harvested.

10.    As older blackcurrant bushes stop producing berries, new bushes are planted and the process starts again.

You can find out more about the journey Ribena berries go on, from bush to bottle, over on the Ribena YouTube channel.

When drinking a glass of Ribena squash, have you ever wondered who grows the British blackcurrants that go into your bottle?

Well, we want to let you know a little more about the friendly growers who help make Ribena drinks so juicy.

The farms are run by a handful of British growers who are really passionate about blackcurrants. We’ve been working with many of the growers’ families for generations and much of their expertise has been passed down to them from their parents and grandparents – it really is a family business.

New blackcurrant bushes are planted each year, but it takes about three years for the bushes to start growing berries and up to eight years before the blackcurrant bushes are at their peak for harvesting – so a lot of care and patience is needed.

And it doesn’t take long for the blackcurrants to be made into juice – most of them are squashed within 24 hours of picking;  that’s pretty fast work!

When drinking a glass of Ribena squash, have you ever wondered who grows the British blackcurrants that go into your bottle?

Well, we want to let you know a little more about the friendly growers who help make Ribena drinks so juicy.

The farms are run by a handful of British growers who are really passionate about blackcurrants. We’ve been working with many of the growers’ families for generations and much of their expertise has been passed down to them from their parents and grandparents – it really is a family business.

New blackcurrant bushes are planted each year, but it takes about three years for the bushes to start growing berries and up to eight years before the blackcurrant bushes are at their peak for harvesting – so a lot of care and patience is needed.

And it doesn’t take long for the blackcurrants to be made into juice – most of them are squashed within 24 hours of picking;  that’s pretty fast work!

With some tasty blackcurrants, our lucky families helped us make some delicious smoothies when they visited the Ribena Farms.

Watch the final part of the Tales from Ribena Farm, A Kitchen Tale, below.

Growing the tasty blackcurrants that make up Ribena can be a tricky task. Our competition winners searched for buried treasure in the blackcurrant fields and learnt a little about how we grow the blackcurrants.

Enjoy the third part of the Tales from Ribena Farm, The Berry’s Tale.

Growing the tasty blackcurrants that make up Ribena can be a tricky task. Our competition winners searched for buried treasure in the blackcurrant fields and learnt a little about how we grow the blackcurrants.

Enjoy the third part of the Tales from Ribena Farm, The Berry’s Tale.

We had a great time in the sun with the twelve lucky families who came to visit our British blackcurrant farms to find out what goes on there.

They got involved with lots of fun actvities, including treasure hunts, smoothie making and bird box making and are now stars of our Tales from Ribena Farm videos!

You can see the first video, The Farmer’s Tale, below.

We had a great time in the sun with the twelve lucky families who came to visit our British blackcurrant farms to find out what goes on there.

They got involved with lots of fun actvities, including treasure hunts, smoothie making and bird box making and are now stars of our Tales from Ribena Farm videos!

You can see the first video, The Farmer’s Tale, below.

The wildlife pledge from the Ribena Team

The tasty blackcurrants that go into Ribena squash are grown by a handful of British blackcurrant growers.

While the blackcurrants are being grown and harvested we want to make sure that natural habitats are not being disturbed and that more native species are encouraged to live on the farms amongst the berries.

With a little help from our friends

So, with the help of The Wildlife Trusts, a Wildlife Conservation Plan was developed for each farm to make them even more wildlife-friendly.

What we’ve achieved so far

More than 1,000 bird and bat boxes have been built to encourage nesting; new trees and hedgerows have been planted for breeding and feeding; and wild bird seed mixtures have been sown.

One of our blackcurrant growers in Herefordshire has also restored a pond on his farm and has seen lots of frogs return to it. He has also set up a diversion for his tractors to keep the frogs and tadpoles safe.

And we’ve seen more exciting results: an estimated 5,000 birds have started their lives in a nest box provided by the makers of Ribena, and our farmers have done a great job of managing an estimated 100 miles of hedgerows in a more wildlife-friendly manner.

We also estimate that over 75 hectares of field margins and headland have been enhanced for local habitat, all as a result of our partnership with The Wildlife Trusts.