Back-to-school essentials: Healthy, kid-friendly options abound from bite-sized items to snack packs

With kids heading back to school and resuming after-class activities, the fall season is a hectic time for families.

Busy schedules and staggered mealtimes can often lead parents, understandably, to opt for convenience over good nutrition. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

More and more, suppliers and grocery retailers are working together to provide convenient, healthy options for children and families in the produce aisle — perfect for school lunches and on-the-go snacks.

The best part, says Marissa Ritter, marketing manager at Naturipe Farms in Naples, Fla., is that kids love them.

“The variety of textures and flavors that fresh produce offers are a big factor,” she said, adding that berries are a particular favorite with children. “Families love that they can encourage their kids to experiment with different textures, such as with the smooth skin of a blueberry, the teeny-tiny seeds of a strawberry or the ridged edges of a blackberry, all while eating a nutritious snack.”

Beyond the appeal of the produce itself, suppliers make it easy for parents to provide healthy options with kid-sized portions, ready-to-eat snack packs and fun, colorful packaging.

Size matters

When it comes to school lunches and meals at home, bite-size fruits and vegetables are clear winners, says Jessica Talbot, registered dietitian for Coborn’s Inc. in St. Cloud, Minn.

“Fresh produce that kids can grab and easily eat excites them,” she said. “They enjoy the independence and autonomy of self-feeding on things like baby bell peppers, berries and baby carrots.”

These products are an especially nutritious option for growing bodies when paired with high-protein dips like hummus and Greek yogurt, she said.

Becky Fanion, category manager for fresh produce and floral at Stop & Shop, based in Quincy, Mass., has seen more shoppers gravitating toward healthy snacking items like mini cucumbers, mini peppers and bite-sized tomatoes.

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“I think customers are realizing there are more healthy veggie options besides the typical baby carrot or celery stick,” she said. “We have also noticed that shoppers are willing to pay more for great flavor, especially in the tomato category.”

Mucci Farms, based in Ontario, offers several snacking products geared toward kids, including cherry tomatoes, mini cocktail cucumbers, mini peppers, and bite-sized strawberries. The company’s Veggies-to-Go snack packs, featuring cute, kid-friendly packaging, combine different varieties of snacking produce.

“We have found that snacking options have been steadily on the rise as society continues to emphasize healthy eating,” said Emily Murracas, director of marketing for Mucci Farms.

Likewise, for Ontario-based Pure Flavor, snacking produce is a big hit with small consumers. “The snacking category is our fastest-growing segment,” said Chris Veillon, chief marketing officer, “and certainly our most popular.”

Pure Flavor’s Cloud 9 Bite-Sized Fruity Tomatoes and Uno Bites Nano Cucumbers are the top snacking items, Veillon said, along with sweet mini peppers. The company also offers Mini Munchies tomato and veggie snack packs in single-serve breakaway cups.

Apples are another kid-friendly favorite for back to school — especially when they’re pre-sliced.

Kim Reddin, marketing manager at Okanagan Specialty Fruits in Summerland, British Columbia, points to a study by Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab showing that kids will eat more apples if they are sliced rather than whole. In addition to larger-size packages, Okanagan Specialty Fruits’ sliced Arctic apples come in snackable minibags.

“Demand for the 2-ounce packages is steady throughout the school year, as this size is very popular with our K-12 customers,” Reddin said.

Kid-centric graphics

Getting kids to eat more fresh produce is often a matter of capturing their attention at the grocery store with colorful packaging graphics and fun characters.

“We placed a great emphasis on creative design elements that were kid-centric,” Murracas said. “Through the use of colors, typography, graphics and recipes, we underwent a rebrand of several Mucci Farms specialty snacking items to create visually appealing branding catered to children.”

Naturipe also uses bright, vibrant colors on its labels and packaging to signal kid-friendly appeal. “We think eating fruit is fun, and we want our packaging to show that,” Ritter said.

Teaming up with retailers

Retailers are also encouraging kids and families to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables this fall, both through their own efforts and via participation in programs such as Produce for Kids — a campaign through the Healthy Family Project that raises money for food banks in retailers’ communities.

Amanda Keefer, managing director for the Healthy Family Project, said Produce for Kids is working on numerous back-to-school initiatives for the upcoming season, including digital content about on-the-go snacks, meal planning and fun produce facts for kids. The organization’s website also provides access to an e-newsletter, kid-friendly recipes and a toolkit for retailer dietitians.

When working with retailers, Keefer said, “our campaigns are all very different and created with the shopper of that market area in mind.” For example, this September, Publix will kick off a Produce for Kids campaign with a free e-cookbook created with support from participating produce suppliers.

Coborn’s, another Produce for Kids retail supporter, employs an active team of store dietitians to promote healthy eating. In 2017, the market launched the Kids Cook at Home program. It began as an in-person class for up to 12 kids at a single Coborn’s location and later switched to a virtual format that reaches 350 kids per class across four states. Classes are free, and each features two to three recipes.

“We maintain a core theme of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption throughout all our classes,” Talbot said. “This looks like something as simple as cutting bananas to look like ghosts, or [it] can be more complex, like adding veggies to pasta sauce for spaghetti cups.”

Each month, the Coborn’s dietitian team also designates certain produce-driven snacks as “Moo Items,” which are then promoted in stores and on Instagram by MooBell, the store mascot. There’s a designated page for Moo Items on the Coborn’s e-commerce site so parents can easily add them to their shopping carts.

Each fall, as kids go back to the classroom and sports activities, Naturipe Farms encourages its retail customers to create prominent back-to-school displays that showcase ways in which fresh berries can be incorporated into a child’s school routine.

“Promoting berries as a bright, eye-catching, exciting option that also happens to be nutritious helps to boost sales with consumers,” said Jim Roberts, the company’s president of sales.

Mucci Farms supports retailer efforts in multiple ways, Murracas said.

“These initiatives include kid-friendly spins on recipes such as our Cucumber Sushi, which we promote through videos on our social media channels,” she said. “These efforts are topped off with targeted ads on social media along with in-store demos to drive customers into stores.”

Through its “promoted retailer” program, Pure Flavor creates geo-fenced content on Facebook and Instagram that leads consumers to a custom-designed landing page highlighting the retailer and specific products. Content includes recipes, blog posts and nutritional information.

“The goal is to not only promote the product but the retailer,” Veillon said. “We need to go beyond the package in all that we do to engage with consumers.”