Plastic-Free Snacks for Kids
One question I hear a lot is, “What snacks do you feed your kids?” The person goes on to tell me that their kids are in love with X Y Z snack that only comes packaged in individually wrapped plastic bags and how their kids cannot live without them.
My kids are the same way but I’ve learned to distract them with other options.
I used to buy the typical kids snacks like goldfish and animal crackers in the largest box I could find. You can buy goldfish cartons larger than a gallon of milk at Target for relatively cheap. So, that’s what I used to buy, before committing to being 100% plastic-free.
Even after I stopped buying them, my little one still asks for Goldfish. When a sweet little voice asks for Goldfish and remembers to say please, it’s tough to say no, but it’s much easier now that I don’t have any in the house.
Whole Foods
The first tip to feeding your kids plastic-free snacks is giving them whole foods. Cut up fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s a lot less likely these will come individually wrapped in plastic–then again I have seen individually wrapped bananas so you never know.
This is a typical snack box I would pack my older child. She loves fresh bell peppers and we always have celery in the house for my husband.
Thanks to a year-round farmer’s market, I always have fresh berries in the house as well. I get raisins and cereal in the bulk section and sliced cheese at the deli.
Other whole food options include:
- bananas
- tangerines
- peaches
- grapes
- apples
- kiwis
- carrots
- cucumbers
If you want to jazz up a whole food you can always add a little dip. Adding a nut butter (which you can get in glass jars or using your own jar in the bulk section), ranch (glass jar), or homemade hummus is an easy way to entice picky eaters to have whole fruits and vegetables.
Another way to jazz up fruits and vegetables is with a smoothie. Homemade smoothies are a great way to sneak in some spinach and add some extra vitamins from whole foods for your kids.
Snacks in Bulk
I’m lucky enough to live in an area that has more than 5 different stores that have bulk options within a 10 mile drive. So, I have lots of different options when it comes to bulk.
My kids like these bulk options:
- Veggie Chips
- Smoky Flavored Trail Mix
- Raisins
- Dried Cranberries
- Dried Mangos
After my kids have finished their dinner and after-dinner fruit they are allowed some chocolate or candy. These are some of the candies I get in bulk:
- chocolate covered peanut butter cups
- chocolate and caramel eggs
- chocolate chips
- fruit snacks
- strawberry flavored Australian licorice
In addition to package-free goodies, buying items in bulk also saves money! Let’s take fruit snacks as an example. These are some organic fruit snacks available at Whole Foods. While $10.99 per pound sounds like a lot, let’s look at how much a box costs.
A box of Annie’s organic fruit snacks at Whole Foods costs $3.99. But if you look at the box it says it has a total of 4 ounces of fruit snacks in the box.
There are 16 ounces in a pound. Take $3.99 multiply that by 4 and you get $15.96 per pound. The packaged fruit snacks are $4.97 per pound more than the bulk ones!
Also, it’s hard to tell but the bulk fruit snacks are HUGE. The individual pieces are more than double the size of an Annie’s fruit snack. If you weren’t already convinced by the packaging, maybe the savings in money will help convince you to shop in the bulk!
Deli Snacks
By the time my older child was 3, she could ask for prosciutto. That tells you a little something about how much I love food. To get prosciutto, I would bring my container to the deli of my locally-owned grocery store and they would slice a bunch of prosciutto and put it in my container.
I can’t tell you how happy I was when I discovered my local grocery store sold prosciutto in the deli section. I love this stuff, but it always comes in a plastic bag and then to make it worse, between each slice of prosciutto is a sheet of plastic. I understand that the slices stick together but it is an excessive amount of plastic.
So, to be able to get prosciutto without plastic, I was happy as a clam!
Turkey and other deli meats are another great option for snacks. My kids love snacking on turkey.
Like most kids, mine love cheese. I get a Harvati Dill cheese sliced at the deli and give them to my kids as a snack. I bring my beeswax wraps to the deli section and ask them to hand me the cheese so I can wrap it instead of placing it in a plastic deli bag.
Instead of individually wrapped string cheese, you can buy blocks of mozzarella and cut up your own strings. I often hear that it doesn’t taste exactly the same as regular string cheese. While I’m sure it’s not exactly the same as the brand of string cheese you might buy, when kids are presented with just one option they’ll usually take it if the other option is nothing at all.
Bakery Snacks
The bakery section has a lot of plastic-free options. Granted you usually have to wade through all the plastic options to get to them, but they exist! In nearly every grocery store, there’s a bakery where you can order cakes and get fresh breads and bagels.
My kids love croissants. Usually by themselves and sometimes with a slice of cheese. So, I get fresh baked croissants in the bakery case of my local Whole Foods. I bring a produce bag and use those to carry home my croissants. In the same case are usually bagels, donuts, muffins, and other baked goods.
There are also a number of loaves of artisan breads that are available but I generally get all my breads at Panera. (Their French bread is delicious!). Sometimes my younger one just likes to snack on bread.
Make and Bake
If you’re handy in the kitchen and have some time, you can always make you’re own snacks.
The easiest snack or breakfast I feed by kids is a boiled egg. There’s protein, it’s filling and my older child loves to peel the boiled egg herself.
Other homemade snacks I’ve made include:
- granola bars
- muffins
- hummus
My kids love helping me in the kitchen–even if it’s stirring a pot on the stove. By making snacks, you can involve your kids in the process and they can learn how different foods are made.
Benefits of Plastic-Free Snacks
Besides the obvious benefit of no packaging, providing your kids with plastic-free snacks adds the extra benefit of being better able to control the amount of sugar you give them. These days everything from salad dressing to bread has sugar in it.
Most packaged snack bars have A LOT of sugar. By steering away from those options you can cut out the added sugar in their diets.
Another benefit is that snack time is a chance to expose your kids to different foods without the commitment of an entire meal. I remember hearing that it takes our taste buds 12 tries before we know if we like something or not. And in a 2010 study it showed that kids who tried a vegetable they didn’t like eight or nine times began to like the vegetable.
By continually exposing your kids to healthy options you can train their taste buds to like these options.
With this in mind, we have a rule at our dinner table that you must try at least one of everything. I know my child dislikes zucchini and has eaten it well over eight times but she knows she has to eat one piece if there’s zucchini for dinner.
Do you have any rules for your kids at your dinner table? Tell me in the comments!
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