Reviewing Why Pouch-Style Baby Food is a Great Choice

When it comes to food and babies, how to feed them plays just an important a role as what you are feeding them. Baby food in jars used to be the old standby, but along with the green movement and the mass production of organic baby food, reusable pouches have come onto the scene with their own list of benefits and truly admirable baby-friendly qualities.

Peace of mind and ease of use go hand-in-hand whether you are a new parent, a well-seasoned parent, or a caretaker. Feeding your child with a pouch allows both you and baby freedom that you couldn’t have with jar-feeding, and it gives them the capacity to learn essential physical movements involved with feeding themselves and being independent.

Ease of Use: For Both Parents and Babies

When you think of a “pouch”, often the first thing that comes to mind is a small cloth knapsack — or just a kangaroo. The pouches that we’re talking about are neither; baby food pouches can come in one of two options: Containing pre-prepared food, or empty and ready for homemade baby food.

The easiest option, of course, is the food pouch that comes pre-prepared with yummy baby food, and many of these options are organic, so that you know your baby is only getting the best. These pre-prepared pouches are no different from buying jarred baby food, except in the fact that they are more easily traveled with, easily stored, and perfectly safe to give to your baby while they learn how to feed themselves. The in-between ages can be difficult, and now you can fill them in with a squeeze pouch for you baby until they are ready to handle a spoon!

Going “Green” with Reusable

Preserving the environment is important to many people, and while it’s great to recycle all of those glass baby jars or repurpose them, it’s even better to reuse a baby item. Squeezable pouches provide a wonderful option for parents looking to save money and time, they are as easy to use as a juice box — but much healthier!

At a young age, baby can still be spoon fed with the pouch by squeezing a small amount of food onto a baby-safe spoon, and as they age, they’ll eventually learn how to squeeze their food pouch themselves. The bes part? This can all be done with a constant rotation of a few pouches! The options are endless and you can fill them with a homemade food, or store-bought.

Baby Food From Scratch

Speaking of homemade baby food, we all know what a struggle it can be to work all weekend re-stocking your baby food shelf, and then going through the work of jarring it all or fighting with proper tupperware. With reusable pouches, all of that trouble disappears.

You can either store homemade food in the pouches themselves (be sure to wash pouches thoroughly if your baby puts them in their mouth so as to prevent the spread of bacteria), or store in one bulk container and portion out servings as your baby needs them! Easy to use, handy, and portion-controlled? Now that sounds like a solid weekly baby food plan in the making!

Affordability

When you compare how much money often goes into repeatedly buying baby food in jars, it’s easy to see the allure of pouch style baby food. Whereas jars are usually single-serving, pouches can be re-capped, stored in the fridge for short periods of time, and used consecutively over several days until they’re finished. The same goes for reusable pouches; food can be stored in pouches while giving parents the time and extra money to make their own from scratch — thus controlling exactly what goes into your baby’s mouth and making it en masse.

Time Saving, Something We All Love!

Dinner time is a mad rush. Any parent knows that when 6 o’clock rolls around, it can be chaos to set the table, rally the rest of the family together, set up baby, and do all this while dinner is in the oven on the verge of burning (or hopefully not!). It’s interesting to think that one pouch of baby food can help this situation, but fear not — it may save you precious time. Babies between four and six years of age begin to slowly incorporate solid foods into their diet, and this is also prime time for many parents to resort to the jarred baby foods.

However, this also means sitting down with your baby and spoon-feeding them until they are steady enough with their hands to bring the food to their mouths. This is not a quick task, especially if you have a picky baby or one who is fussy around dinnertime. Enter: Baby food style pouches. Once removing the cap (make sure to do this, as caps can present themselves as a choking hazard to small children, especially babies who don’t know any better!) on your food pouch, it is then safe to give right to baby.

This is something that simply can’t be done with a jarred food, and something that is stimulating to your baby as well as teaches them fundamental self-feeding techniques. Babies learn how to squeeze with their hands shortly after birth, and when food is the reward, pouch style baby food is a no brainer!

Less Mess, Shorter Bath time

Those are the magic words: Less mess. Anyone who has spent any time around a baby knows that they can, and will, get their hands into anything that can be smeared, eaten, thrown, or mushed. With squeezable food pouches, your baby is actually encouraged to squeeze the pouch in order to get their food out.

It’s a simple motion, but to a baby, it’s fun and less messy than the all-too-often occurrence of a tiny baby hand flailing and knocking a fully loaded spoon to the floor! This also saves time, ever so slightly, on spoon feeding — without the need to constantly dip a spoon into a tiny baby jar and scrape to the very bottom, all you need to worry about as a parent is squeezing and helping the choo choo train make it safely to the station.

Safety

Of course, when dealing with any baby food, caution should be taken to not contaminate any surface or item that your baby may put into their mouth. Baby jars, while great to repurpose and recycle, do not have a main purpose of being reused for baby food or with baby feeding. Food pouches offer the opportunity to be reused, but are also easily washed with no hard-to-reach spaces or lids that can trap potential bacteria. Again, as with any baby-safe products that come into contact with a child’s mouth, they should be washed after every use unless being used in conjunction with a spoon.

In Conclusion

In short, pouch style baby foods present a worthy list of benefits that are sometimes crucial to a parent looking for a solid alternative to the jarred baby food of the past. Whether your reasons are to be more environmentally friendly, to provide ease of use to your travelling family, to save money, or simply put, just to give your baby the best and safest option when it comes to self-feeding, the squeezable pouch is something to consider.