Bitsy’s Brainfood is a new name in our pantry, but I’m pretty excited about them.
They’re a natural food company for kids founded by two parents with a mission to make healthy fun. Because, let’s face it, the grocery store options for packaged snacks and playful cereals has been lacking for years: “the healthy aisle was no fun—and the fun aisle wasn’t healthy.”
To be honest, I’m not sure why there are so many artificial dyes and flavors and unpronounceable ingredients in kids’ snack foods. (And as much I have some fond nostalgia for that pink sugary milk that gets left in the wake of some of those bright-colored breakfast cereals, it just seems wrong.)
Fun snacks and treats have a place in our lives. For goodness sakes, they sometimes seem like the only way to keep the kids still in a shopping cart or stroller when I need to run errands between meals. And I can’t even imagine taking a long plane ride or driving that route to Los Angeles without a full arsenal. So I really appreciate finding ones like these that use whole grains and that draw their colors and their flavors from real fruits and vegetables—things like beets and sweet potatoes and zucchini—as well as, sometimes, chocolate.
In fact, what I like most about their cookies are how they celebrate rather than try to obscure those flavors. The Orange Chocolate Beet cookies are sweet enough to be a special treat (Hudson kept looking for where I’d put the bag) and they actually taste like oranges and chocolate and beets—not just filler and sweetener, and not just cocoa powder. You can taste the zucchini in Zucchini Ginger Carrot cookies, and there’s even a little kick from the ginger.
There’s no substitute for fruits and vegetables (and no one at Bitsy’s would argue so), but when it’s time for a cookie treat, it’s nice to think that these fit in with my larger goal of offering them a broader range of flavors (or put otherwise, to fight the preschooler’s tendency to opt for an ever-narrowing range). Food preferences get harder and harder to change with every year!
Of course the best part for Hudson was finding “Hudson’s letter” in his snack cup (which meant that the second best part for me was how long he sat digging through said cup to find it). And last week we used the numbers in the cereal to make a clock!
We found the brand at our local Nugget Market, but Bitsy’s Brainfood have just launched in many Target stores—so the snacks and cereals are now available nationwide.
Have you tried them? And what other distractions do you hand your kids in the shopping cart to keep “sticky fingers” at bay?
Find all Bitsy’s Brainfood products at a store near you. This post is sponsored by Bitsy’s Brainfood, but all thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you for supporting Hither & Thither.
6 Comments