If like most parents and caregivers, you’ll always be on the hunt for new and exciting ideas on healthy snack foods for toddlers. With busy toddlers unwilling to sit down for long periods of time to eat, offering frequent snacking opportunities is a great way to help keep them fed and nourished. Having a range of snack options either readymade or ready with the ingredients to quickly make some, is your best option.
After your child is one year old, they are ready to experiment more with their food choices and eat multiple times a day. For a toddler, three meals and two or three snack times per day is ideal, containing a variety of food groups including:
- Dairy foods – cheese, yogurt and milk. Dairy alternatives can be given instead due to allergies or intolerances.
- Protein foods – from beans to meat, lentils and fish, protein helps to fill little tummies up for longer.
- Carbohydrates – choose wholemeal grain options for bread, crackers and pasta for extra fibre.
- Fruit and vegetables – choose fresh and cooked frozen fruits and vegetables over dried, tinned or juiced options.
- Fats and oils – healthy fats and oils should be used in cooking and as a spread in small quantities.
From these food types, we’ve made a list of our top ideas on snack foods for toddlers below.
Table of Contents
Best Ideas on Snack Foods for Toddlers
We’ve tried to make our snack food list a combination food types, tastes and length of preparation required to give you plenty of choices:
- Sliced avocado and grated cheese
- Toast fingers with hummus
- Cooked pasta and grated cheese
- Tuna fish on crackers
- Cottage cheese with grated carrot and celery
- Banana and a boiled egg
- Sliced ham sandwich
- Fruit yogurt
- English muffin pizzas
- Spinach pickets with cream cheese
- Rice cakes with a spread such as peanut butter or marmite
- Lengthwise sliced cucumber and capsicum with hummus
- Fruit or vegetable muffins with a glass of milk
- Fruit smoothie
- Cubed chicken with cooked peas
- Mashed avocado on rice cakes
Next, we’ll share a few tips on the preparation and presentation of snacks for your toddler. For additional valuable tactics and related information, explore https://cookiebot.org/.
Preparing & Presenting Your Toddler’s Snacks
It is important to remember when selecting and preparing snack foods that some can be a choking hazard due to the shape or texture of the food. This risk can be reduced by modifying the snack presentation, such as grating carrot and apple or slicing grapes in half lengthwise and avoiding offering small foods which could easily get stuck in a toddler’s throat.
It is useful to have snacks that can be prepared quickly or ahead of time and stored ready for hungry tummies. Depending on the food type, these can be stored in the fridge, freezer or an air-tight container. Presenting the snack on a plate, with a napkin and the appropriate cutlery, along with a drink on a table or highchair helps reinforce that food is something important we should stop for and take time to enjoy.
We hope that you find our list of the best snack foods for toddlers useful! Bon appetite.
