How to reduce plastic in lunchboxes and children’s snacks – Food For Kids Podcast episode 29

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. As you know, the mission of this podcast is to help parents and educators to feed their children as well as possible and to try and be as kind to the planet as we can, but without placing extra burdens on families who are already a bit overstretched and without increasing the overwhelm.

Today we're going to look at reducing packaging waste in kids' meals. That's mostly snack foods and lunchbox foods. I know it's something we all want to do but it can be quite hard when there are so many things to balance. A lot of the time the advice that is out there for both healthy eating and reducing waste can either be quite expensive or time consuming and honestly we're all busy and skint these days.

So I wanted to suggest something practical and that's to talk about how we can reduce a little bit at a time the single use packs of items for kids that could possibly be packed at home. Swapping out just one item per lunch box can really add up, not only for reducing plastic waste, but also in saving a bit of money and sometimes ending up with your child eating better, less processed food some of the time.

I'm going to be very careful here to make sure that you know that if you use packaged foods for your child, either because you're incredibly busy or because your child is fussy and will only eat certain branded packaged foods or because you've found processed foods cheaper than trying to experiment with fresh foods and them going to waste you are going to get zero judgement here. There is a reason we've all ended up using a lot of these products. If you're in a phase of life where you're overwhelmed and you cannot face thinking about trying to reduce your packaging on food or where your child is finding food really hard and actually some packaged items make your life easier and their life less anxious then skip this episode. If you think it's going to make you feel any kind of way, just skip it. You can tackle this when you have the energy to tackle it and if today isn't that day then protect your peace and don't listen to this next bit when I talk about why this is a good idea if you can.

However, if you are in a phase of life where you're thinking about how to reduce some of the packaged foods that your child eats, and you're looking for some easy wins to reduce them, then listen on.

Right, okay, so hopefully now I'm only talking to the listeners who have got the bandwidth for this right now and want to be fired up. So here's something that might give you little bit of motivation to just make one small change.

A survey back in 2019 of over a thousand office workers found that the average bought lunch uses around four packaged items. While that doesn't sound like much in one lunch, that means about 20 a week and taking into account a few weeks of holiday, that's just under a thousand pieces of packaging per year. Most of these are single portion packages which are not recycled and lots of them aren't even able to be recycled because they mix materials together to make them waterproof or food safe. So that's thousand items a year.

If you apply this to children's food, if you think about a child's lunch box for an average day, there's usually two or three items in there with packaging, thinking about things like yogurts or tubes, packets of crisps or cookies or crackers, individual sausages or cheese, mini packs of fruit, fruit leathers or cereal bars. Let's say your child has only two per lunch and they take one extra one for a snack per day and let's even say they have a school dinner a week because they love roast dinners. They'll still end up with 12 items a week which over the average 38 weeks of term is 456 items a year per child.

Again I'm saying this to help motivate you and not to make you feel bad. We've been led down this path and sometimes our lives are chaotic or our kids need something familiar and comforting and this is something to think about only if you've got the space to think about it.

But if that has made you feel like you'd like to do something practical to chip away at it, why not pick one item per day to try to change? Is there one item that your child takes to school that you could replace with the same quality, possibly even the same brand, but in a tupperware or in reusable bag or a wrap?

For example, could you replace a snack pack of grapes with a punnet for the family at the weekend and decant some of it into tubs for lunches? That's swapping five containers for just one container and you end up with more grapes too, so some to share at home. If you're lucky enough to live near a decent greengrocer, you might even be able to get a bunch of grapes without a container at all and just use a reusable bag, although I know that greengrocers are hard to find in lots of places.

Sometimes it only helps a little bit with the packaging but it also helps with money. If your child likes individual packets of branded cheese could you buy a block of the same brand for your family and then chop up strips or cubes into pots instead?

I'm going to take one very famous branded cheese in a mid-price supermarket as an example to use. Their six packs of mini portions at 20 grams each, so 120 grams total, for about £2.10, that comes out to 35 pence per cheese. And their standard size block of cheese, not even their large family size block, their standard size block is 350 grams. So that's 17 portions if you're doing 20 grams each and that costs around £3.75 so that ends up as 21p each instead of 35p each. So you’re effectively getting about seven portions free.

So if your child is the only one in the family that likes that particular cheese, it still comes out better on money. And on the packaging front there still is a bit of a win because although there is plastic on the big pack you're getting 17 portions instead of 6 and there definitely isn't nearly 3 times as much packaging in the big block as there is in 6 small packs. And in reality most of the time you'll probably be buying the family sized block of cheese for other things anyway. In addition if you want to you can make the portion size exactly what your child is likely to eat a bigger portion for a bigger child or smaller little cubes for a little one who only manages a couple of bites.

So that's just one example of how you could maybe think this through and pick a thing that works for you.

The key is to start with small changes and get your child on board. As I mentioned in the lunchbox episode, school can often be hard for kids socially and unfortunately crappy peer pressure does extend to the lunch table. My kids hated if they were the only ones with little pots of fruit and veg while all their friends had crisps and cookies and frubes. We compromised and they chose one branded packaged item to take and then they were happy with the other ones being from home. For your family it might be a different balance.

Have a little think about whether there is just one snack or lunch item that you could swap out for something decanted or prepped at home. Most of them can be potted up at the weekend in one fell swoop and kept in the fridge or cupboard so you're not having to do them on a weekday.

Our kids are often very environmentally conscious so they might be on board with the idea that you can find one item a day to swap if you tell them that they will be saving 190 packets from landfill each school year.

If that has made you feel like you can face one small step, then you might be inspired by today's interview with Suzanne Moore, who runs a small business called Nom Nom Kids. She makes reusable pouches and containers for all kinds of children's foods, with fun prints and characters on them to mimic the fun packaging on processed foods. I spoke to her last week about how she made some of those changes for her family.

Joanne (07:12)

Suzanne, I followed your business NomNomKids online for quite a while because the product and your content seems to be very focused on helping parents reduce waste and give their children less processed choices and that's something I really care about too. What's that actually the mission behind starting the business?

Suzanne (07:27)

So it probably was unintentionally in a way. Initially it was really to help me. So I'd got a baby that was about to start weaning. I'd got a toddler who was a bit fussy and the only way he would eat fruit was through a pouch. he was also dairy intolerant. So I desperately wanted to fill my own pouches with what I wanted. So dairy free things, fruity things, yoghurt that I knew he would eat if it was just in a pouch.

So that was the initial kind of reason for starting the business. And from there, it kind of got me thinking about all the things that were in the supermarkets, all these packages that were just fun and, you know, my kids would instantly be drawn towards them. So they would be like, look, there's a cool monster on that. There's a cool dinosaur, you know, a bear, whatever. And that's what they wanted to eat. They didn't care what was in the packet. So as I kind of went along, I was developing products that actually I could take a cucumber out with me but it was in a cool pack I just wanted them to be as excited about all these basic foods rather than all these ultra processed snacks that you get in the supermarket. and as my children have grown we've kind of introduced more things that can help them also take out foods that are basic, easy, easy to eat at home but harder to kind of take on the go with you.

Joanne (08:44)

That's great. Because I mean, obviously a lot of these processed packaged foods are really helpful for busy parents so it's not really about demonising those products. But as you say, sometimes that can mean that your child actually ends up with quite a narrow diet because they're eating purees all the time and not learning about different textures, more bitter flavours. They can probably get a wider range of foods if they're using a reusable pack.

Suzanne (09:07)

Absolutely and also think parents don't realise what's in them. So they'll be feeding so many dried fruits without even realising it because the little fruity bar looks like it's got strawberries and apples, it all sounds amazing. But when you look at it, it's got sticky fruits that sticking to their teeth and they're eating a huge amount of sugar albeit fruit sugars, but a really kind of intense portion size of it without really realising what's in there.

Being able to decant your own versions of that into a little bag and go, yep, that's a really nice portion size. That's what's good for my child, not what the food manufacturers have decided is the portion size for them, I think really, really helps.

Joanne (09:49)

So if a parent is listening to this podcast now and they've been wanting to tackle this in some way, either to reduce their use of more highly processed foods or products with like single use packaging and they're trying to reduce that and they're a bit overwhelmed and short of time. What are some suggestions that you can give them for either snacks on the go or things that they can add into their lunchbox that will help them with this without outlaying a lot of money or spending hours meal prepping.

Suzanne (10:15)

Yeah, I think the main thing is to not think that you've got to put loads of stuff in a packed lunch. and it doesn't need to be, you know, lots of treats and puddings. You don't need all that. I'd say keep it fairly basic. So sandwiches, obviously don't wrap them in cling film or tinfoil. Find something reusable, you can put them in. Obviously we have reusable sandwich bags, but whatever kind of wrap you want to use for that, or straight into a lunch box.

And then a portion of fruit and a portion of vegetables. And again, don't use kind of fruit winders and things like that. Use real fruit. So if your child's not very good at eating a whole apple, chop it up, put it in some water with a tiny bit of salt or lemon juice, and then pat that all dry after a few minutes. And those will stop them from going brown and you can put that into a reusable bag or into a little pot as well. Another option is things like carrot sticks, cucumbers. So go with things that you would eat at home, but you're taking them out with you, but make them fun. You can cut them up into little shapes, you can put them into cute little bags that will make them seem much more fun.

And you can also then do things like yogurts for pudding. We have reusable yoghurt pouches, but you can also just put them into a pot. You can even put sprinkles on top and mix it with a little bit of chia seed so you're adding a little bit of goodness and it looks fun to your child as well.

Joanne (11:40)

I like the idea with the yogurt of putting some sprinkles on top and putting it in a tub. I was thinking about your reusable pouches, but actually, just a tub with a decent seal means you can decant a much bigger yogurt and add your own fruit if you want to, rather than having to buy lots of individual pouches.

Suzanne (11:54)

Absolutely yeah, just buying big pots of yogurts and using those and decanting them into pots or pouches, either option works perfectly.

Joanne (12:03)

And the pouches that you can buy in the shops for some of these things, one of the nice things you can do with lunchboxes is freeze them so that then they're providing some cooling for your lunchbox rather than having to have a separate ice pack. Would the same thing apply to either your pouches or a little Tupperware?

Suzanne (12:18)

Yep, absolutely. yeah, yogurts, you can freeze. I'd always test it with your child beforehand because sometimes yogurts can separate. So always test that at home before you're kind of taking it out on a fresh run. But things like smoothies you can put in pouches and you can put those in the freezer and use that as a freezer pack as well.

Joanne (12:37)

OK, so that's brilliant for your kind of fruit and vegetables and trying to get more fruit and veg into children. What about some of the things that children really love, the kind of crunchy, savoury elements like crisps and crackers and so on, rather than just buying the tiny little packages that are made for children.  Is there any other ways that people can do that in their lunchbox?

Suzanne (12:58)

Absolutely. So you can buy big bags of crisps. Obviously, check the ingredients, check that there's not too much salt in there. But things like buying popcorn that you can put in the microwave that you can then you end up with a big bag of that, that you can decant into individual portions. And then you can put those in the cupboard and just pull them out when you need them. So that's a really good option. Or like say the big bags of crisps and things you can do the same with.

So instead of buying multi-packs that have got an outer layer of plastic and then you've got the internal plastic as well, and again, you can use pots, you can use bags. Obviously we love our bags because they're really cool and they're really cute, but anything will work. Just make sure it's reusable.

Joanne (13:37)

That's brilliant. My kids used to always like dry cereal. They liked to sort of Cheerios or Weet-o's. They used to have like a little handful of that in their lunchbox and I think they always thought that Weet-o's was like a chocolate treat and it really wasn't.

Suzanne (13:49)

No, exactly, cereals. there's also like refill stores that you can go to and they'll have all the cereals. a lot of them have crisps and other crispy snacks. So you could even buy, you know, a big bag of those. You're actually having no waste at all from the shop to, your child's lunchbox.

Joanne Roach (14:08)

I like that Suzanne reminded us to keep things simple, not everything has to be Pinterest worthy, but investing in a few inexpensive reusable containers to decant those bigger packs or fresh produce into definitely made my life easier. I used to chop up a load of fruit and veg on a weekend and put them into the fridge in little pots and our kids and my other half would grab some for lunches. When they were older they joined in with the prep too. But there are lots of different ways to tackle it so find one that could work for you and then ask your child to help to pick so that they feel like they're choosing it.

Suzanne's company Nom Nom Kids makes lovely reusable pouches for yoghurt, smoothies and baby purees. And they also make snack bags and sandwich bags as well as ice pop bags, which are quite cool, and freezer bags that are all reusable. And they have lots of different designs for different age groups. I'll put her links in the show notes. She does live sales on TikTok once a week too, if you want to see any of the products being demoed.

I hope that gave you bit of inspiration and I'd love to hear if you decide to try any these ideas so please send me a DM if you do. I hope to see you for the next episode on Thursday but in the meantime, happy eating!