Wholefoods: 10 BLW Foods to Buy from Whole Foods

The Spice House (1s):

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Whole Foods Market (1m 0s):

And while you might wanna offer your baby chicken, you'll be like, oh, cool, I'll just go to the grocery store and grab a rotisserie chicken. It's already cooked for me. The problem is, is that those have so much salt in them that they're not appropriate for early eaters. But at Whole Foods, if you get there early enough, they have a naked rotisserie chicken. So it's their unseasoned, which means unsalted rotisserie chicken. And the ingredients in there are just chicken. So it's perfectly fine for your baby to eat. And we tend to stick to the darker cuts of poultry. So the legs, the wings, the thighs. You want those fattier cuts that are certainly safer and easier for your baby to eat. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weening here on the baby-led Weening 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. Well, hey guys, welcome back. In today's episode, we're talking about Whole Foods Market. Either you love it or you hate it. Maybe you've never heard of it, but I've got 10 baby-led weaning foods that you can get from Whole Foods Market today that your baby can safely start eating.

0 (2m 12s):

This is the fifth of a five part series where we've been looking at different grocery stores around the United States with ideas on foods that you can buy for your baby from them. We started an episode three 17 with Trader Joe's and 10 Baby Lead Weaning Foods to Buy from. Trader Joe's episode three 19. We went to Costco. Episode 3 21 was Sprouts Farmer's Market. Episode 3 23 was Walmart. And now we're on episode 3 25 looking at Whole Foods. And the way I'm gonna run this episode is like the other grocery store ones that I've been doing, I'll be showing you five foods from my five step feeding framework. So this is each week, if you're picking out the five new foods your baby is going to eat, you can write these down on your grocery list, go to Whole Foods and grab 'em. But then I'll also be sharing five other grab bag foods, just some random ideas as I walk around Whole Foods like, Ooh, babies would love that, or You can eat this, or, I forgot that they had that.

0 (3m 0s):

So with no further ado, let's go ahead and get started. Looking at 10 baby led weaning foods to buy from Whole Foods. Now for these grocery store episodes, if we're following the five step feeding framework, we're choosing one new fruit each week. One new vegetable, one new starchy food, a new protein food, and then a new allergenic food. So those five food categories, that five Step Feeding Framework, it's the backbone of my hundred first Foods program. And we're gonna go ahead and start with the fruit. Okay? Now, when you get into Whole Foods, it can be really overwhelming. You know all the jokes about like your whole paycheck. And I used to shop at Whole Foods A when I live closer to one and B, when I only had one mouth to feed.

0 (3m 40s):

Now that I routinely cook for 10 people, that's my seven kids, my husband, me and our a pair. I do not shop at Whole Foods. It's like not one stop shopping for me, but I definitely will go there for some pantry staples. And we're gonna talk a little bit about their 365 private label brand, which is actually very affordable and high quality. But when it comes to the produce, it can be a bit on the price of your side. I used to do a lot of TV segments a couple of years ago, like Pre pandemic. And then during the pandemic I did all the TV segments from my home and kind of burned out because trying to set up a fake studio with seven kids was like just a little too much. But I would regularly go to Whole Foods because of course they always have the highest quality produce.

0 (4m 20s):

It looks beautiful, it literally looks like a TV commercial, use their produce on TV all the time. But one thing I do like about Whole Foods, and it's a beef that some people have about Whole Foods, is that you can find produce that's not available at your typical grocery store. And some people complain like you know, they're importing foods from all over the world that yet, yes, they have high organic standards, but if you're using so many non-renewable resources to get, let's say like a pristine Kiwi from New Zealand sent halfway around the world so you can buy it at your Whole Foods in San Diego, is that really, you know, environmentally friendly, economically sustainable, et cetera? Not really here to talk about any of that. We're just gonna talk about what's available at Whole Foods, including a wide variety of fruits. So I know recently we were doing Kiwi with Baby Braden.

0 (5m 3s):

So Baby Braden is the baby of a friend of mine from preschool days, not my preschool, my kids preschool. And we were picking out the foods that the mom wanted to do and she's like, Kiwi. And I was like, oh crap, there was no kiwi at my regular grocery store. Beautiful Kiwis at Whole Foods. And what I love about Whole Foods is that you're not just gonna find one type of kiwi, right? There's gonna be a couple of different ones. And so you can always find the golden Kiwis there, which I love. And golden Kiwis. Fun fact, you can actually like the Sun Gold Kiwis. You can eat the skins of those. I mean, you can technically eat the skin of regular kiwi, but it's kind of gross and fuzzy. But I generally don't feed the skins of any fruits to babies. But for older babies, if they're doing really well with different textures or your toddlers, you could do the very, very thin sun, gold, kiwi fruit skins if you wanted to.

0 (5m 43s):

But for my earlier eaters, I'm just gonna take the kiwi, wait until it's ripe, scoop it out, I cut out the woody part. So the middle kinda white core, if you're talking about the typical green kiwi, a lot of times in the sun gold kiwis, there might be a little bit of a woody core in the middle there. As long as any the the hard, you know, kind of crunchy parts, you wanna remove that and then the nice soft strips of flesh and offer that to the baby. So I love the Kiwi as far as fruit options go at Whole Foods when it comes to vegetables. I also recently was down there and we got some chiyote squash. So I do have squash on my hundred first foods list in lots of different ways and lots of different types of squash all around the world that you can find at Whole Foods. I live in Southern California in San Diego. So chiyote squash is usually regularly available at most typical, you know, Western grocery stores.

0 (6m 28s):

They're also in Mexican food grocery stores. Occasionally I can find 'em in some of the Asian grocery stores, but they always have them at Whole Foods. And for Chiyote, what I'll do is I, I'll either poach strips about the size of my adult pinky finger, or if you cut it really, really, really thin on your mandolin and it's almost like kind of disintegrates, it's that thin. I'll sometimes do that with vinegar on it for babies. And that's really fun. Babies can definitely have vinegar. We just don't want any of the salted vinegars. I don't do the pickled chiyote for like the early eaters in phase one of baby-led weening. So that's the first usually eight weeks where we're just focusing on the solid foods. But I loved to do the poached chiyote squash strips. I'll remove the peel, cut the core out of the middle, cut it into pieces slightly larger than my adult pinky finger, poach it for a few minutes until it's nice and fork tender and then the baby can pick it up and feed it to themselves.

0 (7m 15s):

Squash like most fruits vegetables is a high water content food. So it will lose some of that water when it cooks and cooks down a little bit. So start with the pieces a little bit bigger than you want the final end product when you poach them. But check out the chiyote squash options at Whole Foods. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

BetterHelp (7m 36s):

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0 (8m 41s):

So we've got a new fruit, we'll do Kiwi, a new vegetable chiyote squash. Now it's time to pick a starchy food. And there's lots of great whole green options at Whole Foods. I recently got a bag of amaranth there. So Amaranth is a really, really teeny tiny, small whole grain. And I was making it for a baby and I couldn't find amaranth online from Bob's Red Mill. I usually buy all my whole grains online from Bob's Red Mill via Amazon, but for whatever reason, I don't think Bob's Red Mill's making amaranth anymore. So that's one of the whole grains on our list that Bob's Red Mill doesn't carry. I'm like, all right, well where am I gonna get it? My intern was actually going by Whole Foods, she lives closer than I do. So she picked up a bag of amaranth and we made some amaranth fritters for Baby Florence, a baby that we were also working with.

0 (9m 24s):

It's a super tiny whole grain packed with iron plant protein fiber and it was really cheap. I think it was like $2 for the bag of amaranth. So I know that Whole Foods gets a bad wrap, the whole paycheck joke and it costs a lot of money to shop at Whole Foods. But those middle aisles, which there are a lot of healthy food fines in the grocery store, in the middle aisles, sure there's a lot of package and processed junk food that we want to steer clear of for babies. But there's lots of great staple foods like Whole grains at Whole Foods and that was from their 365 brand. So the Everyday 365 brand is Whole Foods Private label, and again, very high quality organic foods if that's important to you from a taste or quality or environmental or ethical standpoint.

0 (10m 4s):

From a nutrition standpoint, organic foods do not contain more nutrition than conventionally produced foods, but most of the foods you're gonna buy at Whole Foods are gonna be organic. So organic amarant is a good whole grain to pick up. Now it's time to move on to the fourth new food of the week and we've got to pick a protein. So on my protein list on the hundred first foods listers, both plant and animal proteins. And one of my favorite foods from Whole Foods is their naked rotisserie chicken. I have lots of resources on how to make old chickens for your baby if you want to, but if you don't wanna deal with it, you might be like, oh, I'll get my baby a rotisserie chicken. But your run-of-the-mill grocery store rotisserie chicken, eh, can't do it for babies cuz it's gonna have way too much salt. But at Whole Foods, if you get there early enough and you have to kind of hunt around cuz they get mixed in with the regular ones, but they have a naked or unsalted rotisserie chicken and you know that you're looking at the right one cuz the ingredient list just says chicken instead of chicken salt brine.

0 (10m 59s):

You know all the additives that a lot of your typical grocery store chickens would have. I also have been finding unseasoned, meaning unsalted chicken, whole rotisserie chickens at Sprouts. But they actually kind of cost the same at Whole Foods. So if you want an easy way to feed your baby chicken, we tend to stick to the darker cuts of meat, the legs, the wings, the thighs, those are fattier cuts of meat. And the fat that lubricates those protein strands makes it easier for your baby to swallow. And rotisserie chicken usually too high in salt, but get the naked one from Whole Foods if you can find it. And that's a great new protein for your baby to try. All right, fifth food that we're gonna do for the week, we always round it out with an allergenic food. We choose from the list of the big nine allergenic foods.

0 (11m 40s):

Those are the nine foods that account for about 90% of food allergy. We wanna introduce those allergenic foods early and often. One of the big nine allergenic foods is cow's milk protein. Now if your babies have formula, of course the base of commercial infant formula is cow's milk protein. So you don't really need to worry about like making your baby be exposed to that cuz they've been having a lot of it. But for the exclusively breastfed babies, we definitely wanna get that cow's milk protein in early and often. But a lot of dairy foods, right? We don't do fluid cow's milk in place of breast milk or formula prior to age one, cow's milk is not nutritionally equivalent to infant milk. So we kinda hold on that till after one. You can certainly use whole milk products as ingredients or in other foods as you know when you're cooking or making new foods for your babies.

0 (12m 21s):

But one of my favorite ways to do cow's milk protein is with ricotta cheese or ricotta cheese and ricotta cheese is a lower sodium soft cheese. You'll note that the soft cheeses tend to have less sodium and there's a really great whole milk ricotta cheese from the 365 brand at Whole Foods. I love this one. We don't do the part skim, right? We don't want any reduced fat dairy products for babies prior to two years of age, okay? And that's because your baby still needs fat from foods for their still developing brain. So we always default to the full fat, meaning whole milk brands. And so you want whole milk ricotta as long as it doesn't say part skim or non-fat. It generally is full fat, but you know, turn it over, read your labels and you'll be impressed with how little sodium is in there.

0 (13m 4s):

We're looking for generally less than 100 milligrams of sodium from a package or processed food that you might be serving to your baby. That's my rule of thumb. There's no hard and fast rules about sodium. We've done tons of episodes here on the podcast about salt if you want to learn more, but I love the 365 ricotta. So there you have it When you get to Whole Foods, the five foods you can pick up this week for your baby, you'll knock 'em off your hundred first foods list. The new fruit is a kiwi, the new vegetable is a chayote squash. The new starchy food is amaranth, which is a whole grain. The new protein food is chicken if you can find that naked rotisserie chicken. And then the new allergenic food is going to be the whole milk ricotta cheese. You can just do that from a preloaded spoon. You can make it a dipper or a top run pancakes or any other foods that you're serving to your baby.

0 (13m 47s):

Now as far as five grab bag foods go. I told my intern, it was like, okay, here are my criteria for what I'm looking for in a shirt, a list of a lot of other baby-led weenie foods we've bought from Whole Foods and this is what she came back with. Unsweetened applesauce is a wonderful thing to buy from Whole Foods. You can buy that 365 brand, it's pretty cheap. I think we paid like $2 and 50 cents for a decent sized container of it and use applesauce to thin things out. Like for example, nut butters, you know, and we don't serve sticky nut butters to babies. We got a thin 'em out with something like breast milk or formula or unsweetened applesauce. As long as the ingredients just says apples, you are good. Another grab bag item from Whole Foods. It's kind of knocking on their produce a little bit. It's beautiful, but it certainly is expensive.

0 (14m 28s):

But one thing I love about the produce section at Whole Foods is it's so colorful, right? They have lots of different colors of different vegetables that you might not find at your traditional grocery store. So I love to do like purple cauliflower or I love the try color carrots from Whole Foods because carrots are a great simple starter food. You can roast them into strips and your baby can pick them up and feed it to themselves, but they want to experiment with different colored foods as well. So check out the tri colored carrots there. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

2 (15m 0s):

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0 (15m 36s):

A good starchy food that you can find actually in the frozen foods section at Whole Foods is they have these crinkle cut fries with no salt added. So one of the problem with frozen french fries obviously is that they're gonna have lots of weird ingredients in them, including way too much salt for babies. But the crinkle cut fries that don't have added salt, you can cook them until they're nice and soft. I would add a lot of extra oil, extra oil and extra fat makes things easier for babies to swallow cuz we don't want them to have any dry bread products or any dry protein products. So check out those crinkle cut fries as a way to offer your baby potato really easily. A protein food that I love from Whole Foods are there 365 kidney beans. So when you're buying canned foods, there's lots of great canned foods that work for babies, but we always want to look for the no salt added or no added salt varieties.

0 (16m 21s):

And there's a great can of no added salt kidney beans from Whole Foods as part of their 365 brand. And I would say they're comparable in price to a lot of the store brands at other cheaper stores. So you know, you kinda gotta look in those middle aisles sometimes look on the lower shelves for the more affordable items. There's lots of great things you can do with kidney beans. I would recently worked a kidney bean pie recipe. So with some tomatoes, some no salt broth and egg, some kidney beans, kind of put it all through the blender, baked it in a mini loaf pan and then cut it into strips about the size of my adult pinky finger. We served that for baby all more recently. So at six months plus two weeks she was able to have kidney beans cuz kidney beans by themselves. You know you can smash 'em with your thumb and make 'em safe for your baby to eat.

0 (17m 3s):

But early eaters can't eat kidney beans cuz they don't have their pensa grasps so they can't pick 'em up and feed it to themselves. Your older eater, heck yeah, smash 'em with your thumb and put 'em out there and your baby can practice that pensa grasps. But for your early eaters, work it into something like a kidney bean pie. If you wanna grab weekly baby-led weaning recipes. Each week I send out a roundup email that has a baby-led weaning recipe of the week. I think we have kidney bean pie coming up soon. If you want to sign up for the email list, there'll be a link in the description. We are listening to this podcast and I'll send you an email every week with the baby-led weening recipe of the week for more ideas on how you can make these foods safe for your baby to eat. And then lastly, allergenic food from the grab bag. I just love the plain full fat whole milk yogurt from the 365 brand at Whole Foods as well.

0 (17m 46s):

There's always lots and lots of other brands and you know, whole Foods is very well known for having, you know, regional brands available. So depending upon where you are, you know and which region of whole Foods you're in, you'll have different brands. But 365 being a nationwide brand, as long as it's not non-fat, low fat or reduced fat yogurt, that means it's whole fat or full fat. Sometimes we'll say 5%, okay, but we just don't want skimmed milk products as we want that fat for your baby. Do a preloaded spoon for the yogurt. Sure, it's kind of a mess to clean up. I always kind of try to line up Bath day with yogurt day cuz it is such a pain to clean. But it's so fun to watch babies learn how to eat foods like yogurt. You can practice out of a preloaded spoon. So you put the yogurt on the spoon, put the spoon in your baby's hand, let your baby bring their hand to the mouth, then you'll preload the spoon and rest it on the side of the bowl is the next step.

0 (18m 32s):

So your baby can pick that up and bring it to their mouth. And then a few weeks and months into it, your baby will start actually dipping and scooping on their own. But we do wanna practice with that spoon starting at around six months of H. If you guys want to grab the full copy of my a hundred first foods list so you can be knocking off these five new foods with your baby each week, I give that away on my free one hour online workshop called Baby led Weening, four beginners. You can sign up for this week's workshop times@babyledweening.co. Again, that workshop's at baby led weaning.co. Everyone on that free training gets a copy of my hundred first foods list. There's a q and a section at the end. Make a point to answer every question. If we don't get to your topic on the training, always follow up by email.

0 (19m 12s):

So it's a great place if you're trying to learn more about giving your baby a safe start to solid foods, come check out that workshop baby led weening.co. Thank you guys so much for listening. This show notes with pictures of each of the foods that I went through will be available online for this episode@blwpodcast.com slash 3 2 5. And a special thanks to our partners at AirWave Media. If you guys like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain, check out the podcast from AirWave or online@blwpodcast.com. Thank you guys so much for listening and 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.

0 (19m 60s):

But I wanted to ask you for a real quick favor. So recently the baby-led Weening Made Easy podcast joined the AirWave Media Network who helps us with our podcast ads management, and every year AirWave conducts a listener survey to help gain more insight into who is listening to which show. And I know you guys like things like Real Food and Responsive Feeding and Respectful Parenting, baby wearing Montessori, some or none or all of those things. But AirWave wants to hear from you via this listener survey so that the ads that you hear on this show are of use and of interest to you. It only takes a few minutes to complete the listener survey and you can be entered to win a $500 Amazon gift card at the end of the survey. As a thank you for participating. So to complete this survey, you have to go to this website, bit lee slash bw AirWave.

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Again, that's bt.ly/bw AirWave to complete the survey. And thanks so much for listening to the show.