The stuff you should know
As parents we’re under immense daily pressure to provide the best we can for our children. Everyday there are new reports on the link between what we eat as children and our future health, development and relationship to food. That’s why it was so important to us to develop our recipes with childhood nutrition experts. You see, just making delicious meals for children isn’t enough. They need to provide the right balance of nutrients to support little foodies on their long love affair with food.
As parents we’re under immense daily pressure to provide the best we can for our children. Everyday there are new reports on the link between what we eat as children and our future health, development and relationship to food. That’s why it was so important to us to develop our recipes with childhood nutrition experts. You see, just making delicious meals for children isn’t enough. They need to provide the right balance of nutrients to support little foodies on their long love affair with food.
Ingredients, what's in our meals and why?
Every ingredient has been selected for a reason. Most have nutritional values that support children’s growth and development, but some are just plain yummy. Where possible all ingredients are organic.
We’re big on flavour. The bolder the better. Introducing little foodies to herbs and spices early on will only enhance their journey. As adults, we don’t like to eat bland food, so why would our little ones? We make meals that you as a parent would happily eat too.
As well as focussing on flavour, we worked with our nutritionists to ensure Iron amounts were at the forefront. Iron for weaning babies and toddlers is so important. It’s an essential nutrient needed to produce hemoglobin. Without hemoglobin, red blood cells can’t do their job properly which can result in delayed age appropriate growth and development. This is why we have teamed iron rich foods like lentils, chickpeas, red meat and chicken thighs (which are higher in iron than breasts), with rich vitamin c ingredients to aid in the absorption of iron.
In fact, so important are the ingredients to us, we’ve even considered how meals are cooked. We exclusively use Rapeseed Oil because of it’s Omega-3 powers.
Omega 3 is good for eye, brain, bone and joint health and development.
We’re proud to say that we never bulk up purees with fruit and focus solely on keeping those first tastes as pure as possible.
For more detail on the ingredients used and why, read the full notes from one our nutritionists here.
Our portion sizes.
How much should your child be eating?
Our portions are quite big, because we are generous. We recommend our toddler meals for ages 12mths-4yrs. However, you know your child, trust them to tell you how much or how little they want to eat. If they eat it all, that’s fine, if they leave most of it that’s fine too. Most of the meals are large enough to split over multiple days or between two or more children.
Judy one of our nutritionists has provided some wisdom on this.
“Responsive feeding is letting your baby decide how much of each pot to eat. Eating is tiring for babies when they are learning new feeding skills so always allow your baby to stop eating when they signal to you that they have had enough. To signal this, they may keep their mouth shut, hold the food in their mouth without swallowing it, turn their head away from the spoon or push the spoon or bowl away with their hand. Toddlers eat varying amounts of food at different meal and on different days so allow your toddler to eat just as much of these meals as they wish. It may be the whole pot, or it may be less than half the pot but trust your toddler to eat the amount they need.”
Read more about child nutrition and weaning on her website.