321: Sprouts Farmer's Market: 10 BLW Foods to Buy from Sprouts

Katie Ferraro (1m 25s):

Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning here on the baby-led weaning Made Easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning. If you have a Sprouts farmer's market in your town, you're probably aware that it's a pretty affordable place to get produce, even with prices going crazy. I still find like in my town, Walmart and Sprouts definitely have the most affordable produce and Sprouts has a lot of other good options for feeding your baby as well that you might not have realized.

Katie Ferraro (2m 10s):

So in this episode, I'm gonna be sharing 10 baby-led weaning foods to buy from Sprouts. And this is the middle part of a series I'm doing featuring five different grocery stores that are pretty ubiquitous in the United States. We did Trader Joe's to start out with, then I shared 10 Costco Foods that work for baby led weaning. This is the Sprouts episode. Next week we are doing Walmart and then the following week after that Whole Foods. And the point of this series is if you have a copy of my hundred first foods list and you're picking out the five new foods that you're gonna feed your baby this week, if you're going to any one of these stores and you just want me to pick out the foods for you, I'll share the foods that I think work great. But this is certainly not an exhaustive list. There's so many more foods in these stores that work, but I just wanna pick out one food from each of the five food groups in my five step feeding framework.

Katie Ferraro (2m 56s):

So the way the framework works is we introduce five new foods each week, one new fruit, one new vegetable, one new starchy food, a protein food, and an allergenic food. So in these grocery store episodes, I'm sharing the five foods from one from each of those food categories so you can get a whole week on your one shopping list. And then I'm also sharing five grab bag ingredients or grab bag items that I like to have on hand when I'm also introducing new foods to babies. So if you want to grab a copy of that hundred first foods list, I give it away to everyone for free on my weekly workshop called Baby Led Weaning four Beginners. This is a one hour online video training where I show you what the first 10 days of baby led weaning look like. How to safely prep some of these foods, how to differentiate between gagging and choking and get over your fear of introducing foods like allergenic foods.

Katie Ferraro (3m 43s):

It's a pretty intense hour, but it's very thorough and covers all of the info you need to kind of crack the code on giving your baby a safe start to solid foods with baby led weaning. You can sign up for this week's workshop times and grab your copy of the hundred first foods list by heading to babyledweaning.co. Once you got that list, let's dive into Sprouts and pick out some foods for your baby. Now a little sprouts backstory, I'm in San Diego. I grew up with Bony Market. So in 1943, Henry Bony began the Sprouts legacy. He had a fruit stand in San Diego and then I forget the whole story, but remember there's like some family strife and there was some splintering off and some different stores like growing up, we always had Bonies and Henry's markets.

Katie Ferraro (4m 26s):

They essentially felt like the same thing from the same family under different names. In 2002, the sons Stan and Sean Bony, they were Henry's sons in grandson. They opened the first Sprouts market in Chandler, Arizona. So I remember like that was such a big deal when they went to Arizona from San Diego, but now they're all over the country in there's 370 stores. So it's very likely that there's a Sprouts farmer's market somewhere close to you. For years, I always had kinda like a love-hate relationship with Sprouts. Once I started having kids, I was like, okay, it definitely is a cheap place to buy fruits and vegetables. And I'd always heard like they basically sell their produce at cost, they make all their money on supplements. And one of my issues there is that obviously you know, most supplements are not going to deliver what they're promising to deliver and that most adults and people in general can get most of the nutrition that they need from real food.

Katie Ferraro (5m 14s):

So they kind of use the low produce prices to get you in the door. But ultimately, if you look at the way the whole store is set up and you notice the fact that they never have registered dieticians associated with them, they always just have like supplement salespeople there. They really are pushing supplements. But if you can walk in, don't look at the supplement aisle because your babies do not need supplements and head to the real food. There are a lot of great fines in the Sprouts, farmer's market, grocery stores. So here are the five foods from the hundred first Foods list. Working my way through that five step feeding framework, the fruit that I love to get from Sprouts. Hold onto your hats. Coconut. Okay, sprouts carries unsweetened coconut threads. So I've shared on the podcast one of the challenges of doing coconut and we put coconut on the the hundred first foods list.

Katie Ferraro (5m 58s):

It's a, it's one of only two fruits that contains fat, right? Coconut and avocado. I did a whole episode on coconut back in episode number 3 0 5. It was called coconut, how to Safely Offer Coconut to Your Babies. And I sing the praises of both Sprouts and Trader Joe's. You generally can get unsweetened coconut threads. If you go to other grocery stores, the shredded coconut that you're gonna find will be sweetened. It's almost impossible to find the unsweetened one. You kind of have to go to more kinda like the health foodie stores, which thankfully Sprouts Farmer's Market has it. The unsweetened coconut, which sh sprouts calls coconut threads. That's located in like by the bulk aisle.

Katie Ferraro (6m 38s):

So it's not in with the baking ingredient. So sometimes it's a little bit hard to find. So they have the unsweetened coconut thread, which is like shredded coconut and they also have wide sliced coconut. As long as the only ingredient there is coconut with no added sugar, it works awesome for babies. So if you want to learn how to use the coconut safely for babies, go back and listen to episode 3 0 5. All about coconut, but definitely pick up a bag of that. It's also pretty competitively priced. I feel like sometimes coconut stuff can be so super expensive for no particular reason other than it was like super trendy, like coconut water and stuff a while go. But coconut water doesn't cut it for introducing your baby to coconut and instead, you know, getting the the meat outta the coconut yourself is really definitely a pain.

Katie Ferraro (7m 21s):

So let Sprouts Farmer's Market do it for you. Check out their unsweetened coconut threads as a way to safely introduce coconut to your baby. Incorporating it into some of the recipes I share in episode 3 0 5 about coconut. Alright, next up is a vegetable. So the vegetable that I like to get from sprouts is pumpkin. Now I don't buy real pumpkin unless it's like pumpkin season and it's available usually in the fall. But they always have canned pumpkin puree. Most grocery stores you can't find canned pumpkin puree if it's not like October November pumpkin pie season. Okay, and you gotta remember there's pumpkin pie puree at your typical grocery store and then there's pumpkin puree.

Katie Ferraro (8m 1s):

Depends how big your store is. Sometimes you can find pumpkin puree. But one thing I like about Sprouts is that their pumpkin puree is always available. They have a regular one, it's usually about like two bucks a can and then they have an organic one. My story was two 50. The most important thing is that when you flip it over, there's zero grams of added sugar. There's no added sodium in there. Pumpkin is a wonderful food to offer your baby. Actually have a free feeding guide with five pumpkin recipes. If you guys want to check that out, I'll link it in the description where you're listening to this podcast episode. If you're like, I don't know what to do with, I can a pumpkin, check out this pumpkin feeding guide and get started feeding your baby this like really nutrient dense food, which you can get for like two bucks at Sprouts using their canned pumpkin puree.

Katie Ferraro (8m 43s):

Alright, the third food that I like to get from Sprouts. So the third day of the five step feeding framework, we already did a fruit, which was the coconut, a vegetable, which was the pumpkin. And then now we're moving on to the starchy food. So there are so many whole grains on the Starchy Foods list in the hundred first foods list. And Sprouts carries a lot of them. They generally carry the Bob's Red Mill products and I like buying them from Sprouts because they tend to be cheaper. Like I buy a lot of Bob's Red Mill stuff on Amazon, but it's not as cheap as if you buy it in the store. And then fun fact, if you do or you are looking for some of those whole grains from Bob's Red Mill, they always have them at Big Lots. You guys have a big lot. Sometimes it's like past their Best Buy date, but it's still safe to eat it and buy it.

Katie Ferraro (9m 25s):

So I like to get a lot of Bob's Red Mill grains from Big Lots if I'm there. But if I'm at Sprouts, they always have it. So it's kind of hard for me to choose because there's so many great whole grains at Sprouts and depending on where you live, the bulk isles will differ. So I wanted to pick something that's consistently at Sprouts across the nation and the Bob's Red Mill Polenta is a great find at Sprouts. Now usually when you buy polenta it's in a tube and it's on the shelf in the store and they definitely have that at Sprouts, but that's not the one that I'm talking about. The polenta that I get from Bob's Red Mill is in a bag. It's organic yellow corn polenta. And fun fact, you can also just buy yellow corn meal.

Katie Ferraro (10m 7s):

So inside of my baby-led weaning program where we show you how to make all of the hundred foods from the a hundred first foods program, we have weekly live calls where you know, parents come on and ask questions about these foods and how they're making them or how their baby's eating 'em. A lot of times they'll ask about polenta like, can't I just buy it from the store? No, because the the polenta that comes in a tube is way too salty for your baby. So we generally make our own polenta using corn meal, but Bob's Red Mill actually has a polenta. And again, you could just use the regular corn meal, which actually tends to be cheaper. The only ingredient in there is corn. So you can make quick polenta. We just don't use salt in it. So you can offer that off of a preloaded spoon or when that cooked polenta cools, you can form it into patties, you can fry those, cut 'em into strips about the size of your adult pinky finger and your baby can eat that.

Katie Ferraro (10m 52s):

So I love getting polenta or yellow corn meal. Same deal from Bob's Red Mill at Sprouts. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back. All right, on day four of each week we introduce a new protein food. If your family eats animal foods, I highly suggest you get in the habit of making animal foods safe for your baby to eat so they can get all that good nutrition and the iron and the zinc plus the taste and the texture that different meat foods afford. I have in my protein part of the hundred first foods list, 10 plant-based proteins and 10 animal proteins.

Katie Ferraro (11m 32s):

One of the ones that people ask the most about is beef and how do you make beef safe for babies? Lots of content inside of my programs about beef, but one of my favorite cuts of beef for babies is a beef chuck roast and they consistently have beef chuck roast at sprouts. They also have a hundred percent grass fed all natural chuck roast, which I think has a lot, lot better flavor than the corn fed chuck roast. Most of the meats at Sprouts are pretty affordably priced. The organic ones will run you a little bit more, but a Chuck roast is a great meat for making soft shreddable strips of meat for your baby. So check out the meat section and the butchers at Sprouts are always so wonderful, they're so knowledgeable, they'll help you on how to make them or if you're in my program, we do have recipes in there on how to make Chuck rose safe for your baby to eat day five of the week, you know what time it is, it's time to do your allergenic food of the week.

Katie Ferraro (12m 27s):

So starting in week one of baby-led weaning in my programs, we introduce an allergenic food every Friday. We do it twice on Friday, twice on Saturday, twice on Sunday with no other new foods across the weekend. We wanna observe for any potential allergic reaction, but we do continue to offer the familiar foods from previous days. And one of the hardest allergenic food categories that I find parents struggle with when introducing these foods to their babies are shellfish. Lots of content on how to make shellfish safe for babies. One of my favorite recipes is a clam pasta sauce that we make without any added salt. But you gotta find the right type of clams and a lot of times the clams that you're going to find in your typical grocery store are going to be in brine, which is salt.

Katie Ferraro (13m 8s):

Therefore the added salt not appropriate for babies. But at sprouts they always carry whole baby clams packed in water. So you can find that in the aisle where all of the candor, the tinned fish and seafood is located where the tuna and the salmon and the sardines, but the whole baby clams packed in water. The brand that I always find at Sprouts, it's called crown prints, it's quality natural seafood, whole baby clams packed in water. And when you turn it over and you look at the ingredient list, you're gonna be like whoa, there's 280 milligrams of sodium in this serving. I thought you always say, you know, you're looking for less than a hundred milligrams of salt for foods that you're offering to your baby.

Katie Ferraro (13m 48s):

And that's true, you are. But when you look at the ingredient list of this whole baby clams, you'll see that the sodium that's in there is naturally occurring. Okay? Seafood like fish and shellfish is naturally high in many types of minerals including sodium. So the salt that you see in there is naturally occurring because when you look at the ingredient list, the only thing in this ingredient list are baby clams, water, and then citric acid. And citric acid is just a preservative that allows the food to be, you know, shelf stable. So without any added salt, you can offer your baby this form of clams, which is a type of shellfish, and then you can work it into a recipe that's safe for your baby to eat.

Katie Ferraro (14m 28s):

So the five foods from the hundred first foods list that I would grab from Sprouts coconut from my fruit canned pumpkin puree for my vegetable bob's red mill polenta or just yellow or white corn meal for my starchy food, a beef chuck roast for my protein food and then clams packed in water for the allergenic food, which will cover shellfish. Now a couple of grab bag foods that I also get when I'm at at Sprouts, if I'm kind of stocking up my pantry, they always have Panko breadcrumbs. So Panko are the Japanese style breadcrumbs and you have to read your labels because for the most part, historically Panko is always lower in salt than like just your run of the mill regular breadcrumbs, right? Cuz most bread is high in salt.

Katie Ferraro (15m 9s):

So the breadcrumbs made from that are high in salt. The brand Kiko man is pretty consistently available across the United States and they're at Sprouts. There's 35 milligrams of sodium per serving. There's definitely other brands of Panko you can buy a Costco that are much higher in salt. So again, turn it over, look for less than a hundred milligrams of sodium. But the way I use Panko is in making fritters. And so we've done a lot of content on the podcast and in different avenues about how to make baby lead weaning fritters. But the base of a fritter, whatever you use it, you usually need an binding agent, which we use an egg or two, and then we usually have some sort of a star to a cooked grained. Or if you are, don't have any of those laying around.

Katie Ferraro (15m 50s):

Panko works great in your baby-led weaning fritters. So episode 1 43 was all about fritters. If you're like new to this space or you're not sure how to make some of these harder to feed foods safe for babies to eat, go check out the episode on fritters episode 1 43. It's called B L W Basics, how to make fritters Safe for Baby-LED Weaning. All right, next food that's on my grab bag shopping list whenever I go to Sprouts is their marinara sauce. That's no salt added, right? Yes, we can make our own sauces for babies, but like if you don't have time, most of the jarred spaghetti sauce that you're gonna find in the store has too much sugar and too much salt.

Katie Ferraro (16m 32s):

So the no added salt marinara sauce from Sprouts has just 50 milligrams of sodium. It does have two grams of added sugar, which is the half of a teaspoon. But what I like to point out is that's in half cup serving and when you're serving your baby, especially early eaters, some of these new foods, the actual portion sizes that they're consuming are so small that it kind of boils down to almost zero grams of added sugar. So that's one of the foods where I kind of will fudge the lines cuz I'm just so grateful that there's a no added salt marinara sauce available at like a nationwide grocery store. And just start reading the labels of some of the spaghetti sauces at the stores where you shop. Like the sugar is insane, but the salt is like crazy.

Katie Ferraro (17m 13s):

Like why do we need 500 milligrams of sodium in a half a cup of tomato sauce? Like you really don't, right? We want our babies to learn how to be tasting these foods and not the salt in them. So I appreciate a low salt marinara sauce and they have one at Sprouts. Another thing on my grab bag list is they always have a good selection of no added salt broths at Sprouts, they tend to have like the brands fluctuate and the prices change and you don't need to buy bone broth, okay? Your baby can just get by with regular broth. Occasionally I do get stuck buying bone broth, which is just a little bit more expensive. And you know, bone broth is kind of a a trendy, fatty adult diet food and people talk all about its protein content. And in reality we know that most babies get plenty of protein from the variety of foods that they're eating.

Katie Ferraro (17m 58s):

We don't want to over prioritize protein, so I don't wanna like fill 'em up with a bunch of protein from bone broth, but you can buy lots of different no salt, no added salt broths from Sprouts. They tend to be mostly the chicken and the vegetable broth. I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but whenever you go to a grocery store, like you can always find no added salt vegetable and no added salt chicken broth, but you almost can never find no added salt beef broth. Not that it really matters and your baby doesn't care. I use chicken broth for a lot of beef dishes and the baby doesn't know, but I'm glad that there are a variety of different no added salt broths at Sprouts. And so I'll pick up a couple of boxes of those when I'm there, especially for making recipes, including meats, safer babies to eat. Okay, another cool product that they carry at Sprouts that I'll buy, and you don't have to do this very often because a little bit goes a long way, is I like the Sprouts brand grass fed ghee.

Katie Ferraro (18m 47s):

So GH is clarified butter. It's basically butter that's been simmered and strained to remove all of the water. So it has this like kind of like nutty caramelized flavor to it. And I like it that it's shelf-stable. So again, a little bit goes a long way. You don't have to refrigerate it, it has a very high smoke point so you can fry some of these baby-led weaning fritters that you're making in it. And then I know like having lived in Nepal for a number of years as a Peace Corps volunteer, they use GH for everything. And so I love like Indian and Nepalese foods and so I like that flavor. I like having it, you know, is it necessary for your baby to eat ghee? No, you could buy unsalted butter and use it for some similar things, although it doesn't have butter, does not have the high smoke point that GH does.

Katie Ferraro (19m 28s):

Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back. All right, last thing in my grab bag at Sprouts, if I'm cruising the aisles, I I will always grab a jar of unsweetened applesauce. They don't have applesauce on my hundred first foods list because if lots of info about making apples safe for your baby to eat and if you keep cooking the cinnamon steamed apples that we make for baby led weaning, it turns into applesauce. But if you just want a jar of applesauce, they have an unsweetened one at Sprouts that's really affordable. It's not a, it's not as big as I wish it was. I like, like a big thing of applesauce when they stopped selling the big thing of unsweetened applesauce at Costco.

Katie Ferraro (20m 9s):

Like it was a sad day in my household because we use applesauce a lot for thinning out certain foods that are sticky for babies. So if you've got like nut butters like peanut butter or almond butter, cashew butter or tahini, if that's how you're doing sesame, one of the ways you can thin it out to make it smooth enough so it slides off your adult stainless steel spoon is by mixing it with unsweetened applesauce. So the sprouts, original applesauce, it won't always say unsweetened. One time my brother-in-law was at the store and he is like, can I get anything? I'm like, yeah, gimme a jar of unsweetened applesauce. He called me like 20 minutes later. He is like, I've been in this apple sauce aisle forever and there's no unsweetened apple sauce. I was like, oh, I forgot to tell you, it's not always called unsweetened. Like sometimes it's just the apple sauce, but you, you gotta read your labels because you can have the same brand, okay, with two different versions of it.

Katie Ferraro (20m 52s):

When you turn it over, one will have like 15 grams of added sugar in it and one will have zero grams of added sugar. And obviously we're looking for the apple sauce that has zero grams of added sugar. That's the one that your baby can have. The ingredient list will just say apples. And then sometimes they have ascorbic acid added to it. AIC acid is just vitamin C. It's an antioxidant that prevents browning, right? If you cut certain foods like apples, pears, et cetera, and expose them to oxygen, the oxidation that begins to happen when the flesh comes into contact with the oxygen causes browning and that unsightly browning that we as consumers don't like babies, don't care, they'll eat brown foods. But like if you wanna keep the apples nice and you know nice looking, they'll add that vitamin C to it.

Katie Ferraro (21m 32s):

So that's just a preservative that's totally safe for your baby to have. As long as it says zero grams of added sugar, you're good with the apple sauce. So in summary, the five foods I would grab for my grab bag, foods from Sprouts the Panko, as long as it's the low sodium 35 milligram version. I like the brand Kiko that they always have at Sprouts. The Sprouts brand of no added salt, marinara sauce, any brand that you can find on the no added salt chicken broth or vegetable broth. Get yourself some sprouts, gee, if you're feeling so inclined. And then also a jar of the unsweetened apple sauce. All right, that's it for Sprouts. If you wanna grab that whole hundred first foods list so you can be picking out five different foods for your baby each week, come join me on the free one hour video workshop called Baby led Weaning for Beginners.

Katie Ferraro (22m 16s):

You can sign up for this week's workshop times@babyledweaning.co. Everybody on that workshop gets a copy of my 101st foods list, so you'll never run out of ideas of foods your baby can eat. Again, sign up@babyledweaning.co and I'll see you on the next grocery store episode where we're gonna be doing 10 Baby led Weaning Foods from Walmart, followed by Whole Foods. Thank you also to our partners at AirWave Media. If you guys like podcast that feature science and food, and using your brain, check out some of the great podcast offerings from AirWave. All of the show notes for this particular episode, including pictures of the foods that I was talking about from Sprouts, will be on the show notes for this episode@blwpodcast.com slash 3 2 1 special thanks to our intern Eliza, who organized all the show notes for you guys so you can see exactly what the foods are.

Katie Ferraro (23m 6s):

So when you're buzzing through the aisles at Sprouts, you can just pick up the right thing for your baby, get home with that baby and start offering some of these safe baby-led weaning foods. Happy feeding. I'll see you next time. Okay, you are a loyal listener, I can tell because you're still listening at the end of this episode here, or maybe you're just too far away from your phone to change it to the next episode.