How to Pack lunch your kid will want to eat
This is part two in my series about getting your kids to eat their lunch at school.
In my first post I talk about all of the reasons why I think kids’ school lunches come home uneaten. If you haven’t read that post yet and are feeling stumped about why your kiddo’s lunchbox keeps coming home untouched, click on over to read that one now.
Hopefully I’ve got some insights you’ll find helpful from my many years of packing lunches and many hours spent in elementary school lunchrooms.
Now that we have some ideas why your child isn’t eating their lunch, let’s get to the tips for how to pack a lunch your child will want to eat.
How to pack a lunch your kid will want to eat:
If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you might have noticed that I am not about extravagant things that take a lot of time. I’m about working smarter, not harder. So my tips for how to pack a lunch your child will eat are all very quick and simple things that I think anyone can do without spending a bunch of extra time, effort, or money. These are my tried and true strategies for packing lunches kids love that only take a few extra minutes or seconds to do.
So let’s get into it!
Here are the top tips summarized, but keep reading for loads more detail about each of these and some helpful links to get you going.
Top tips for how to pack lunch kids will eat:
Make it fun: kids like fun food, and I’ve got lots of tips for easy ways to make lunch more fun
Make it easy to eat: lunch needs to easy to eat in a small amount of time
Add variety: some kids don’t want the same boring thing every day
Bited sized: everybody loves finger food, not only is it fun but it’s faster and easier to eat
No new foods: save the experimenting for the weekends at home
Involve them: kids are much more likely to eat food they participated in choosing and making
Use bento lunch containers: the right container makes it easier to pack and easier to eat
A very simple lunch to make but I know my kids will eat because I’ve used all my tips below.
Now let’s get into loads more detail about each of these tips:
1: Make it fun
I can write many posts about how to make lunch fun, and in fact I have written many.
The short version is that kids like fun food, and they are much more likely to eat food they find appealing. Making it fun is an easy way to make food more appealing to kids.
There are so many little ways to make a packed lunch more fun, and the tips I have are ones that really don’t take any extra time at all. When kids come to expect that their lunch is going to be a fun surprise, they start to look forward to opening that lunchbox to see what fun things they’ve got today.
Here are just a few of my favorite ways to make lunch more fun:
fun and colorful bento picks
food on sticks and skewers - somehow kids love to eat food on sticks
colorful silicone cups
bit sized pieces and tiny forks
cut food into fun shapes
One of my favorite examples of easy ways to make the lunch super fun - just a couple of little fun bento picks stuck in the bagel sandwich to make them look like faces. This takes about 5 seconds to do.
Want even more ideas for how to pack fun lunches? Check out these posts:
2: Make it easy to eat
I talked in part one of this series about how one of the top reasons lunches come home uneaten is that the child isn’t able to eat it independantly. For little kids this is often because there are packages and containers they can’t open.
Here are a few simple ways to make lunch easier to eat:
Use lunch containers that are easy for little hands to open. I have used and recommended EasyLunchboxes (now called EasyBoxes) for over 10 years and the reason is simple - they make lunch easy to pack and easy to eat. They are easy for little hands to open and close. One of my kiddos has developmental delays and muscle weakness, so packages and containers are difficult for him to open. We tried a lot of lunch containers and the EasyBoxes were the winner, he can get them open no problem and he can get the lids back on. The extra bonus is that they are the least expensive boxes I’ve found.
Don’t forget to give them a fork or a spoon for anything you pack that isn’t finger food. If they have to go looking for a utensil then that takes up precious lunch time. Or often a kid will just not even try and won’t eat the food.
Open packages for them: If you are sending things that are in packages, maybe try making a little cut in the package ahead of time so it’s easy to open. Or just open the package at home and put the food in a section of the bento lunch container.
Prep & cut foods for them: Peel oranges, cut up apples, cut bigger things into smaller pieces, cut crusts off of sandwiches if you know your kid isn’t going to eat the crust. There are lots of simple little things you can do that take just a few seconds that can make it easier for your little one to eat their lunch.
Bite sizes bits of breakfast for lunch, in our favorite EasyBoxes.
3: Pack more variety
Now this is a tip that only work for some kids. You know your kid best, and you might have one that actually likes to see the same thing every day so they know what to expect.
But I think a lot of kids get bored with the same foods all the time, so if your old reliable lunch ideas aren’t doing it, then try mixing things up a bit. You don’t have to get fancy and it doesn’t have to take you any more time, but sometimes just rotating a few new ideas in the mix can solve the problem. The most popular posts on this site are the ones about non sandwich lunches, I think that’s because people are looking for ideas to add more variety to their lunches.
One way you can ensure you have a good variety in the lunch is to have a bit of a plan ahead of time. This doesn’t have to be elaborate, but having a plan for what you’re going to pack each day of the week is one of my favorite tips for making lunch packing easier. I have a simple template you can use if you think that might make it easier for you.
An easy and fun twist on classic favorites: A pizzadilla. This is like a quesadilla, but we put a little tomato sauce in there and use mozzarella cheese.
4: Bite Sized
This is part of making it easy to eat, but it deserves its own section. Cut things in bit sized pieces! Not only do little bites make it easier and faster to eat, but they somehow make it more fun.
Just about anything can be cut into little bite sized pieces. It’s such a simple thing to do, and really will take you less than a minute, but it can make a big difference for a lot of kids.
There’s the obvious stuff like fruit and cheese, but I also cut pizza, sandwiches, quesadillas, burgers, and more into bite sized pieces. Basically if it can be cut up, I’ve done it. I could pack the exact same lunch, one with the food whole and the other with it cut into little bites, and I can guarantee you the one cut into bites will get eaten more than the uncut one.
You can put those bites on a skewer which is super fun, I’ve said before that kids love food on sticks. Or you can give them a tiny fork or a toothpick to pick up the bites with. Or just leave them as finger food.
Burger bites on a stick! These are just leftover cheeseburgers from dinner (I always cook extra), cut into bites and put on a little skewer, with a piece of deli paper underneath to just make it more fun. The child who doesn’t eat meat got little cubes of cheese.
5: No new foods
Keep the new and unfamiliar things for home.
When your kiddo opens their lunch box they need to see foods they recognize and they know they will like. This might sound contrary to the tip about about variety, but I don’t think it is. I’m just saying don’t pack foods they’ve never had before or you’re not sure if they like.
I’m big on encouraging kids to try new foods and expand their palettes, but the lunchbox is not the place to do it. Try out new things on the weekends when the pressure is off and you have more time, and if your kiddo likes it then tell them you will be putting it in their lunch.
A very simple lunch of predictable favorites, no new surprises here. But it’s still presented in a fun way that they are sure to eat.
6: Use Bento style lunch containers
You might not think that a container can make a difference in whether a kid eats their lunch, but I believe it does. Another one of the top reasons why kids don’t eat their lunch is sometimes because the whole situation is just too overwhelming.
I talk about this more in part one of this series as well. But I have found that one way to make the food seem less overwhelming is to present it in an organized and tidy way, and bento style lunch containers are perfect for that. Each food has its own little spot in the container, they don’t get all jumbled together, and it makes it easy for the lunch to be presented in a way that feels very approachable.
My favorite bento style lunch container is the EasyBoxes container, and most of the lunch pics you’ll see on this blog are in those containers. They make several sizes now with a variety of compartments, but my favorites are still the original. These containers hold up for years (we literally have some that are more than 15 years old) and they are the least expensive option you can find - literally you can get a dozen of them for less than the price of one of many other brands.
7: Involve them
Get those kids involved in packing their lunch!
Kids are way more likely to eat food that they have been involved in choose and making. I think there are three important steps to involving kids in making their own lunch.
First is the planning. Involve your kid in coming up with a list of foods they are willing to eat for lunch.
I have a simple template I like to use with kids. It has a section to fill in for proteins, veggies, fruits, and grains. You can print this out and sit down with your kiddo and brainstorm ideas for each food category. Ideally you will come up with 5 different things for each spot - then you have a different option for each day of the week. But I think you can still make this work if you can come up with at least 3 for each category.
Next up is shopping. Some kids really love going to the store and getting to pick out their food, and they are more likely to eat things they have chosen for themselves. Take your list with you and let them find and choose each of the items.
Finally is the actual packing. This is where I think a bento lunchbox like the EasyBoxes really shines: You have your list of four categories of foods that your kiddo will eat. You’ve shopped and you have at least 3-5 options in each food group. And you have a bento lunch box with four sections - one for each food group.
Now you just take a bento lunchbox with sections and you put something from each food category into each section of the lunchbox. Kids actually love helping with this, there’s something fun about deciding what goes in each section.
Of course you can get fancier, you can add silicone cups and fun cutouts and cute picks to make the lunch more fun as I talked about above, but you don’t have to. Sometimes simple and minimal is better. Just basic foods they know they like, presented in a very basic way.
When they get to lunch time at school and open their lunchbox they will see a selection of foods that they chose, and they will see them organized in a very simple way and they are going to eat it!
And that’s it.
Follow these 7 tips and I can almost guarantee you that those lunch boxes will start to come home empty.
I hope these tips are helpful for you.