Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Eliminate food waste and wasted money with these tips for balancing healthy lunches and the grocery budget for picky eaters at school.
Minimize Food Waste With Healthy Choices
Balancing healthy lunches and the grocery budget is much easier than you think if you eliminate the convenience.
A picky eater in your house can present challenges when ensuring healthy lunches for your son or daughter at school.
I swear my son has been a picky eater since the minute he was born, so when it came time for him to go to school, the thought of him not eating his lunch or not having enough to eat while at school worried me.
Time For Change
My son’s first year of school was tricky as whatever I sent to school for lunch with him seemed to come home.
Looking back on his first year, I realized there was a lot of food waste and wasted money in our grocery budget.
At this point, I was not only concerned about him not eating enough, but it also made me realize that I needed to change my approach to cut down on money being thrown away.
School Pizza Day is still my favorite day of the month; it’s the one day I do not have to make lunch every month.
My son loves pizza, and as much as I love not having to make lunch.
Pizza is a treat for him, and it’s not something he can have every day if I am going to ensure healthy lunches while at school.
Involve Kids When Planning Healthy Lunches
Meal planning and creating a grocery list are tools many use to ensure they get the most for their money while eating healthy, affordable meals daily.
I have started to include my kids in this process; I am not the only one who eats the food, so why should I make all the choices?
While still offering healthy choices, giving the kids the power to choose some of what they will eat has made getting them to eat it a lot easier.
The little reminder that ‘Hey, you chose this’ seems to help; involvement in decision-making excites him.
Offer Variety As Healthy Lunch Options
While letting your child choose what they eat, you still need to be the parent and make sure they are making good, healthy choices.
Let your child pick multiple foods from a custom list you provided, and find ways to work those foods into your grocery list each week before heading out to the grocery store.
You will soon see that making lunches day after day will become less daunting, knowing that you have food on hand your child will eat.
While some people believe that children should eat what is in front of them, giving them the power to choose makes for happier, healthier, stress-free meals for all three of us in our homes.
Skip Processed Foods
Too much salt is not suitable for anyone and should be monitored and balanced in our diets.
Buying pre-made products like Schneider’s Lunchables is excellent because it covers it all; you get meat, cheese, crackers, or mini-pizzas that are fun for the kids to make.
The lunchmate convenience lunch even comes with a treat of some kind, usually a mini chocolate bar and even now a fruit cup.
While Lunchables are convenient, the sodium content in one of those packages is unreal, almost 2/3, if not more, of my son’s recommended daily intake, and too expensive.
Lunchables ringing in at a cost of approximately $3.49 is too much to pay for something with that much salt and simply not feasible for the grocery budget!
You can make a homemade Lunchable for far cheaper than $3.49.
Even if you get the Lunchable on sale for dollar days, I still wouldn’t buy them.
Salt is only used for baking in our house; I don’t even own a salt shaker, as there is enough salt in everything.
Pack Lunches In The Evening
Making your kid’s lunch at night makes for a less stressful morning, but I admit it doesn’t always happen.
While it is easy to throw in processed, packaged snacks from the pantry, we all know they are not always the healthiest or cheapest option.
I like to keep some cut-up celery and carrots in a container in the fridge so they are always readily available for my kids to snack on.
It only takes a second to grab a few and throw them in a container for lunch instead of scrambling to find something to go alongside his sandwich or main dish.
I also often enjoy baking and making muffins, cookies, and quick breads like pumpkin and zucchini.
Children Need A Variety Of Foods In Their Diet
I’m sure my kids are not the only ones who get bored eating the same things repeatedly, and I get bored quickly with food sometimes.
One way to combat this food boredom is by ensuring I have various food options.
This also eliminates those words of ‘not again’ coming from their mouths and more food going in!
It makes me a happy mother knowing my kids are so glad.
Baking and freezing a few recipes gives him various things to choose from and prevents me from hearing those dreaded words.
Remember that when freezing, you want easy access to these frozen snacks.
When freezing cookies, I like to put them in a container with layers of wax paper in between so the cookies do not freeze together.
I can then quickly grab one or two out to add to his lunch, and by lunchtime, they have thawed in his lunch bag.
I also cut up my loaves of pumpkin and zucchini bread before freezing, layering wax paper in between.
This way, I do not have to thaw a whole loaf at a time to send a slice as a yummy, homemade snack to school.
Meal Plan For Leftovers To Make Healthy Lunches
I like to eat warm food, but my son couldn’t care less if his sausages or baked fish fillets were cold.
When planning our meals for dinners throughout the week, we like to include some foods he can take or any leftovers for lunch the next day.
Be Creative In The Kitchen
Cutting my son’s sandwiches into dinosaurs makes for a fun lunchtime, making him want to eat them.
You can buy sandwich cutters for a reasonable price; they last and are resellable.
I often add a post-it note with a smiley face or a ‘hope you’re having a good day’ as it adds a positive to start him sitting down to eat his lunch, making him excited to eat what’s in his lunch bag.
Skip The Sugary Beverages
When given a choice, I am lucky that my kids will, 99.9% of the time, choose water to drink over anything else.
Making juice from frozen concentrate and putting it in a reusable bottle is cheaper than buying juice boxes.
Using containers versus plastic baggies for sandwiches and other snacks also reduces the garbage you send to school with your child.
Though we have some juice boxes in the cupboard to drink, my son rarely takes one and is more than happy with his water bottle, a much healthier choice and better for his teeth.
Once the juice boxes are gone, we will not stock them again.
Review Healthy Lunch Choices With Children
Even having my son involved in planning our meals involves him in the daily choices of what he will eat that particular day.
Going over these choices every morning with him assures me that he is happy with what he eats that day.
This process encourages him to eat his lunch and bring less food home.
Ultimately, this is the goal for parents who want their kids to eat a healthy lunch at home or school.
We reviewed what he had chosen to take in his lunch bag, which snack was for his morning snack, and which was for his afternoon snack.
This school year has been more successful with him eating healthier foods with less food coming home and needing to be thrown out after sitting in his backpack all day.
Ensuring my child ate a daily healthy lunch was a battle I didn’t think I could win.
However, including my son’s lunches in my meal plan, creativity, and frequent food preparation have been the keys to this success.
My kids are young, but some of these practices can also be applied to older kids; at this point, they may be able to make their lunch, taking some of the stress off them.
A teenager may be a little upset with you if you send a dinosaur sandwich to school, but having things prepared and healthy yet fun options to choose from will make their healthy lunches easier for them as well.
Discussion: How do you ensure your kids eat healthy lunches while staying on budget?
Please leave your comments below.
Thanks for reading,
Mr. CBB
Good post Katrina! Thankfully it’s not an issue we’ve had to deal with yet, but we’ve had our fair share of picky kids. They didn’t start out that way, but have moved more so that way. We’ve found that involving them in the meal planning and gardening has been a major help for us to eat different things.
Amazing isn’t it how kids love something one day, hate it the next and then love it again a week later!
Nice article Katrina. I think your tips are great and can be applied to all packed lunches. I know I work hard to make sure my hubby has healthy balanced meals for his lunches every day. Variety is key to his maximum enjoyment I find. You are so right that including the lunches in the meal plan and grocery list for the week… it keeps things on budget while allowing for an occasional splurge. I like to send hubby with a hot lunch in the fall and winter but lots of salads rich with a protein and grain source for the late spring and summer. He tends to be the envy of his co-workers when he brings out a hot lunch and they have a bland hastily thrown together sandwich. A stainless steel thermos is a great way to keep things hot and it’s environmentally friendly too. I have a set of cutlery from the Loonie store that is strictly for him to take to the office…no plastic stuff to pitch in the bin and have to replace. 🙂 I think the dish that always gets oo’s and ah’s is when I send homemade chicken chow mein for his lunch. He has access to a microwave, so that dish is reheated with the smell wafting all over the office! 😀
NIce tips Katrina! Reading this post reminded me of when my two children were younger and we made lunches for them. My daughter was and still is a very picky eater and it was difficult to find things she would eat for lunch. We finally had some success with leftovers from dinners. By involving the kids in the meal planning, dinner time and lunches go so much smoother!
Great article as usual Katrina!! I had to make a lunch for years for hubby while he worked a straight midnight shift. He got what ever we had for supper that night in a plastic dish he could microwave in the cafeteria at work. With the two older kids, they took a lunch the first few years and then off and on over the rest of the time. The younger boy didn’t take a lunch until high school as he went tot the next town for that. I always asked the kids what kind of sandwich they wanted so I could be fairly sure they would eat it. Thankfully I didn’t have to deal with the current problems with peanut butter as the older boy would only take peanut butter sandwiches!! He’s still like that…. The closest he came to variety was the jam in there. I always had baking to go in too. In grade school I paid for the milk orders for them. With the younger boy in high school he came with me to pick out what he wanted in the way of a cold meat for his sandwiches and his juice for the container. As his Dad took pudding in his lunch so dod the younger boy. One pack of instant pudding per night split two ways. I used plastic containers for everything and he had a plastic spoon that came home every night to be washed as well. I made both his and his Dad’s lunch at night as hubby needed his for the late shift and it was just easier to make both at the same time, two lunches…one mess.
Our daughter is running the lunch detail now and after a few issues the first week things have settled down. The little mr is in a different classroom now. They had to add a class thanks to the numbers, so he was moved. He loves his new teacher!!! His lunch is made the night before as they have to leave quite early. He does have a say in what goes in as she takes him with her shopping and they have always talked about what they are getting and if it is healthy and such. He loves fresh fruit and veggies so that’s good. He takes after his uncle in that he loves his PB but now he knows he can only have it on the weekends!!
I seldom buy processed foods for my daughter especially junk foods. I’m just happy that she really loves fish and vegetables aside from pork. Thanks for this great tips Katrina!
At my kids school, no peanut butter allowed. And also no oranges or anything containing oranges. I would love to make PB&J every day but can’t. I find that meat sandwiches on white bread are disgusting when they are warm. And the kids don’t have a place to eat with a table so anything requiring utensils (soup, chili, etc) is out too.