Walmart: 10 BLW Foods to Buy from Walmart

Katie Ferraro (56s):

And while I love canned or jarred mandarin oranges as a way to introduce your baby to orange, like if you don't want to deal with peeling the membranes offer oranges aren't in season where you live or you can't get them. Right now, the canned and jarred ones, 9 out 10 of them at Walmart, are gonna have added sugar. They're gonna be packed in either light syrup or heavy syrup, which we can't do added sugars for babies. But if you hunt around, you can usually find a jar of the dole canned mandarin orange juice. It's technically in like a plastic jar and they're packed in a hundred percent fruit juice. So normally we say, you know, no fruit juice for babies, but when it comes to the canned and jarred fruits, as long as it's not the syrup, if you look at it, there's zero grams of added sugar. That's totally fine for your baby to have. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning here on the baby-led weaning Made Easy podcast.

Katie Ferraro (1m 41s):

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. Which foods at Walmart can babies safely eat? In this episode, I'm gonna go through 10 different foods that work for baby-led weaning that you can buy at Walmart. This is part of a larger series I'm doing featuring five different grocery stores. So we're on number four. We've done Trader Joe's, Sprouts, Costco. Now it's Walmart. Next week's episode will be about Whole Foods. So something for everyone if you shop at any of those five stores.

Katie Ferraro (2m 23s):

I just want to share some ideas of foods that, to be honest, you can get a lot of these foods at different grocery stores. But there's a couple of things that are specific to Walmart that I want to share. And I did not use to fancy myself a Walmart fan until I moved to the suburbs. And to be honest, the best grocery store in my town, I live in Poway, California. So outside of San Diego is the Walmart. We have Sprouts, we have Trader Joe's, but as far as like price-wise goes, and I'm feeding on the reg, 10 people in my house. So it's my seven kids. We have an au pair who lives with us, who helps us with our kids. And then my husband and myself. I have to say that from a cost saving standpoint, Walmart is a great value and it's the biggest grocery store in my town.

Katie Ferraro (3m 5s):

So it depends what your Walmart is. There's lots of different variations. Some I know like one town over where my sister lives in Escondido, the Walmart grocery is like, ugh. She's like, I won't even go in there. But it depends where you are. So if you do shop at Walmart, here's a couple of my favorite foods. I'm gonna go through five foods from the 100 First Foods list. So that's a list of foods that we give to parents to help their babies get a lot of diet diversity before they turn one. And we offer five new foods each week from that list as part of my five step feeding framework. So we do a new fruit every Monday, a vegetable every Tuesday, a starchy food every Wednesday, a protein food every Thursday, and then an allergenic food every Friday. You do five foods a week. That's 20 foods a month. In five months, your baby's eaten a hundred foods.

Katie Ferraro (3m 45s):

And we know that babies who are exposed to such a large variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures, they become more independent eaters and they become less selective or picky eaters. So when you're heading out to the grocery store, maybe you can add these 10 foods to your list. Alright, let's get started with the five Walmart Foods from my 100 First Foods list that your baby can eat. This week, I'm gonna start out with one of my favorite fruits to buy from Walmart and that's pineapple. Now, when it's in season or affordable, I'm always gonna try to buy a fresh pineapple if I can, but that might not be the situation where you are. And so there's a lot of canned food at Walmart and a lot of it is totally fine for your baby to eat.

Katie Ferraro (4m 27s):

I like to buy canned pineapple slices. So they're the rings of pineapple packed in 100% pineapple juice. Now normally you're aware we don't offer babies juice, fruit juice per se, prior to age one. Kids actually don't need juice. But what we're looking for when we select canned pineapple is we don't want the pineapple that's packed in light syrup or heavy syrup. Okay? Those are added sugars and we steer clear of those for babies. But you can find certain fruits either packed in water or a hundred percent juice, as long as it says zero grams of added sugar, that's fine for your baby to have. And what I do with the pineapple slices is I cut them in half so that they're kind of like half moons and then the baby can pick 'em up and bring them to their mouth and feed themselves.

Katie Ferraro (5m 8s):

You can also find canned pineapple and what are called tidbits, which are little chunks, but I don't love those for earlier eaters cause they're smaller pieces of food that could be a potential choking hazard. Plus our early eaters who don't have their pincer grasps yet, can't pick up those small pieces, but they definitely can pick up the pineapple slices. So check those out as a fruit from Walmart. Next up, we're looking for vegetables. There's lots of options in the produce aisle. And so one that I hadn't covered with the other grocery store episodes that I really like to get from Walmart is eggplant or our eggplant. Eggplant is at Walmart. Maybe I can rephrase it that way. It also tends to be quite affordable. They have at my Walmart, both Japanese style eggplant, kinda the longer skinnier one.

Katie Ferraro (5m 49s):

And then the traditional globe eggplant, which are a little bit kind of chunkier regardless. My favorite baby-led weaning eggplant recipe to make is baby baba ganoush. So baba ganoush, we make it with tahini, which contains sesame. So I do sesame on its own a number of times to ensure the baby doesn't have an allergy to sesame, which is one of the big nine allergenic foods. And then once you're all clear on that, baby baba ganoush is a fabulous recipe, you can really modify any baba ganoush recipe. Just take out the added salt. Don't put anything extra super spicy in there, but it's a nice thick puree that your baby can practice dipping and scooping with their spoon or they'll pick it up with their hand and eat it. But don't be shy about eggplant and Walmart is a great place to get them.

Katie Ferraro (6m 29s):

Now as far as the starchy food goes, the third food of the week, if we're going through the starchy foods in the hundred first foods list, there's lots of cool whole grain options there. There's not as many whole grain options at Walmart as some of the other grocery stores that I'm featuring in this series. But the starchy food that I like to buy from Walmart are potatoes. Now you can just buy plain old potatoes if you want to. And we've covered sweet potatoes. That's a separate food on the 100 First Foods list. But there's this brand of shredded potato that Walmart across the US has. It's called Simply Potatoes, and they're shredded hash browns. Now you find them in the refrigerated section. And normally when you think hash browns like, ugh, gross, highly packaged, processed food that's gonna have tons of salt, right?

Katie Ferraro (7m 11s):

A lot of breakfast potato foods have a bunch of junky ingredients plus a lot of salt added to them. But the Simply Potatoes brand, I love this cause it's just simply potatoes, you guys. It's shredded potato with no added salt in it. So there's 55 milligrams of sodium that's naturally occurring cause potatoes have lots of minerals in them like potassium and a little bit of sodium. So the sodium that's in there, and my general rule of thumb is I'm looking for less than 100 milligrams of sodium per serving of a packaged food if I'm gonna serve it to my baby. And these simply potatoes shredded hash browns fit the bill. I'm gonna post a picture of both the front and the back of all of these foods on the show notes page for this episode. So if you're like, I don't feel like hunting all around Walmart, just show me what it looks like.

Katie Ferraro (7m 54s):

If you go to https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/323, our amazing intern Eliza is gonna hook up those show notes for you. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Katie Ferraro (9m 13s):

Now what do you do with these shredded potatoes? Ooh, great question. I'm glad you asked. I love to make a quiche crust out of these potatoes. So I make these like little zucchini egg cups for breakfast and I share that recipe a lot on social and in my email newsletter, which I'll drop the link to that email newsletter in the episode description, if you want to get weekly baby-led weaning recipes delivered to your inbox, but the zucchini egg cups, another thing you can do is just make kinda like a crust in the bottom of the mini loaf pan or the muffin tin using those shredded potatoes. And I'm sorry, but like peeling and shredding potatoes is such a pain in the neck and yet Simply Potatoes did it for you. So at my Walmart this week, a big bag of those was under $3, which I think is a value for a no salt carbohydrate food for your baby.

Katie Ferraro (9m 58s):

So check out potatoes as your starchy food from Walmart. Fourth up on the list, my favorite protein food of all time to buy at Walmart is liver. I love it personally, I do not like liver, but I love offering baby's liver. And Walmart always has a brand called Skylark. So it's a sliced skinned deveined calf liver. Now if you're like, why in the world is this woman feeding a baby's liver? Because liver is actually the highest iron food that you can feed your baby. And if you're like, yeah, but I don't know anything about liver or how to make liver, go listen to the podcast episode number 103. It's called Liver, How to Offer Liver Safely to Babies.

Katie Ferraro (10m 38s):

But sometimes people are like, okay cool, but I don't know where liver lives in the grocery store. It's generally in the frozen food section. So you can find it at most grocery stores, but they always have it at Walmart. So I always pick up a few from my friends since they're not inclined to buy the liver. I actually did just deliver a thing of liver from Walmart to Baby Florence's mom cause she's like, I want to do liver but I refuse to buy it. And I was like, Ooh, I'll go to Walmart and get you the liver. So check it out. Liver's my favorite, favorite protein food for babies, super high in vitamin A and really rich in iron. Cool texture, usually just fried and butter. Make sure your baby's already had cows milk protein a number of times without reaction before you try this. Fry all the pieces of liver, then send me all the pictures in the videos cause trust your baby is gonna love liver.

Katie Ferraro (11m 18s):

All right, and then the fifth food that I'll buy from Walmart, working through five foods to serve your baby this week. Oh it's gonna be an allergenic food and there's lots of allergenic foods at Walmart. You could pretty much pick up any single one there, but I really, really love sardines. So sardines are a canned fish. Fish is one of the big nine allergenic foods. Shellfish is a separate category. There's lots of good canned shellfish options at Walmart as well. But what we're looking for when, especially when we're going down the canned food aisle is you gotta know that most of those options are gonna have added sodium and seafood is rich in minerals like vegetables are as well. So there's gonna be be some naturally occurring sodium. But there's a brand called Season and it's a little box so it covers the tin of sardines and you can get sardines in water.

Katie Ferraro (12m 4s):

So these are skinless, boneless sardines in water. In water means they're not in brine. So they're not in an added salt bath. And you it says no salt added pretty big on the package. And the ingredients says sardines, parenthesis fish comma, water contains fish. So the contained statement is the allergenic food that it contains, which is fish. We want to introduce our baby to fish early and often there's no benefit from withholding fish. And if you don't like love making fish or you don't know how to or you like fish is too expensive, just get a box of sardines. These were $2.30 for a four and a half ounce tin of sardines. They're packed in water. If you look at the nutrition facts panel, there is 170 milligrams of sodium.

Katie Ferraro (12m 46s):

You might be like, wait a minute, I thought she said less than a hundred. First of all, that's just a general rule of thumb, but that's naturally occurring sodium. And also it's a full adult portion, which your baby's probably not gonna eat because when I read the ingredient list it just says fish. So there's no added salt in there. So the salt that's in there is naturally occurring and that's totally fine for your baby to have you literally just take the sardines out of the can, put it in the bowl and let the baby pick it up and eat it. I was talking to Baby Simone's mom on DM the other day, it's her second baby that she's doing the 100 First Foods program with and she, I was like, I noticed you haven't done sardines yet. And she's like, I cannot bring myself to do it. Some parents just really hate it. Like we have been accustomed and acculturated to not like sardines. Depends, depends what your food culture is. Some people like love sardines, but I would say a lot of people are just like, Hmm, I'm not that sure about sardines.

Katie Ferraro (13m 30s):

Your baby has not been conditioned. Do not like sardines. So get some sardines, put 'em out there. Great new easy allergenic food to introduce to your baby. All right, so the five foods from the hundred first foods list. If you need one week's worth of food to buy from Walmart, get some canned pineapple as long as it's packed in its own juice and then get the slices and you cut 'em in half. Don't do the tidbits. Get yourself an eggplant to make some baby baba ganoush. Get those Simply Potatoes that are shredded. They're so easy, you fry 'em up, do a lot of different stuff with them for your baby. Get yourself some liver from the frozen food section and then a can of sardines packed in water. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Katie Ferraro (15m 5s):

Now, I also have five random grab bag Costco foods that also work well for baby-led weaning. They do have Bamba. Bamba is the Israeli brand of the original peanut puff that was featured in the LEAP study that showed us that early introduction of peanut protein helps prevent against peanut allergy down the road. I don't love Bamba as much as the Puffworks brand of peanut butter puffs, but Puffworks are definitely not in Walmart. I buy my Puffworks peanut puffs online because they don't have any added sugar and they have just a smidge of salt. If you guys go to https://puffworks.com/, my affiliate discount code "BABYLED". If you want to grab a case of the Puffworks, baby peanut puffs, I also recommend getting a case of the Puffworks, Baby Almond (Butter) Puffs.

Katie Ferraro (15m 45s):

You can do two different allergenic foods if you buy online, but if you're at the store in a pinch, Bamba is fine. It just has more salt than I love. It has 135 milligrams of salt. They're always reformulating the recipe and like anything, they're putting more salt in it these days, which I don't really get because you're like kind of marketing it as a baby food, then why are you adding all the salt? But also to be honest and fair, there's a lot of crappy baby foods at Walmart too, but you don't need to go down that baby food aisle. But if you do get some Bamba, it is an easy way to introduce your baby to peanut protein. I also like that at Walmart there's a lot of canned good. Do you know Michael Pollan kind of ruined the middle aisles for people when he wrote that you know, you should eat real food, not too much of it. Shop the perimeter was the thing and like stay away from the middle aisles cause sure that is where a lot of packaged and processed kind of crappy junk foods are.

Katie Ferraro (16m 29s):

But there's a lot of gems in the canned food aisle too. And I love red bell pepper strips. There's a brand there at Walmart that is packed in a little bit of oil. So I like the brand Mezzetta, that's a national brand. There's roasted red bell pepper strips. I've shared a ton of content on how we use that and those instead of raw bell peppers. Cause we never want to offer any crunchier crispy food. So I don't do raw bell peppers, but I will do the red bell pepper strips, which are in a jar from the brand Mezzetta. You can get those at Walmart. Another good find in the canned food aisle. And we were just doing this the other day we were buying, we were showing lots of different ways to do oranges for the Lindo triplets who are a brother and two sisters that I'm working with here in San Diego. And if you can't find oranges in season or you don't want to deal with picking and plucking the membrane out, canned mandarin oranges are a great option, but a lot of times it's, you can only find them packed in light syrup or heavy syrup, which we can't do for babies because it has added sugar.

Katie Ferraro (17m 20s):

But at Walmart, because again, there's a lot more selection. So you're gonna have like four or five or six options of different types of mandarin oranges if you search. And this one took us a long time. I was with our intern and she's like, I don't think we're gonna find any. I was like, no, you gotta hunt and peck around Walmart. There's a lot of good stuff here. The very, very bottom shelf, there was a plastic jar of Dole mandarin oranges in a 100% fruit juice. So there was like 9 out of 10 options you couldn't buy because it had added sugar. But if you search around $3 for a huge like 23 ounce jar of mandarin oranges fed all the triplets and then some more for days. So that's a good option if you hunt and peck around the canned food aisle, get yourself some mandarin oranges, just make sure they're in a 100% fruit juice.

Katie Ferraro (18m 6s):

Another food that I love from Walmart wheat germ, sometimes wheat germ even. It was funny cause I was doing this same kind of lineup for sprouts and Whole Foods. Sometimes it's hard to find wheat germ. And we have wheat germ on the 100 First Foods list. I sing the praises of wheat germ all the time. I use it for lots of things like rolling some of those more slippery foods in like if you're doing the oranges, you know, learning how to eat slippery foods is part of learning how to eat. But you can also roll it in a high iron food that adds some traction like wheat term. They have that at Walmart. And then lastly, if you need one more food for your grab bag, they always have full fat, whole milk, ricotta cheese at Walmart. They have that at every grocery store, but sometimes it's really, really super expensive. I like the Great Value brand from Costco. It's nothing fancy, it's not organic. So if you're an organic dairy person, don't get mad at me.

Katie Ferraro (18m 48s):

Some families eat organic, some families don't. But you want to make sure when you're buying ricotta cheese, it's a great low sodium spreadable soft cheese. I use it for a dipper and topper on lots of things like pancakes and waffles and it doesn't have very much salt. So it's underneath that 100 milligram of sodium threshold ricotta cheese from Walmart. All right, to recap five foods from the 100 First Foods list: pineapple, eggplant, potatoes, liver, sardines. Five random grab bag Walmart foods: Bamba, (Mezzetta) red bell pepper strips in a jar, (Dole) mandarin oranges in a plastic jar in a 100% fruit juice, wheat germ, and ricotta. I will link up all the pictures to the foods on the show notes at https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/323.

Katie Ferraro (19m 27s):

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you guys like a podcast that feature food and science and using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from AirWave. We're online at https://blwpodcast.com and I'll see you next time.