Baby Food Trends
When it comes to weaning babies to solid food, parents take many different approaches. However, most parents want to instill healthy habits that help ensure that their children grow up with optimal nutrition. As dietary habits and preferences begin to form very early, these first weeks and months of eating can have a significant impact on a child’s overall health for life.
As consumers are more health-conscious than ever before, this approach to eating has trickled down from millennial parents to their babies, with wholesome nutrition and functional foods being the cornerstones of the diets they begin providing when their children are ready for more than milk.
One trend stands out above all others in the US baby food sector: a focus on the vegetable content in baby food. Vegetables and other green plant proteins are key ingredients in baby foods that are low in sugar and high in nutrition – in other words; products parents are buying. Baby food companies would do well to play up the vegetable content on labels to showcase the recipe’s natural benefits.
Besides wanting to feed their babies lots of vegetables from the start, parents also overwhelmingly choose simple, natural products – the fewer ingredients, the better. Simplicity is the word of the day, so keep your labels clean, your recipes simple, and take a transparent approach to product information.
At the same time, as parents are (like most of today’s consumers) more adventurous when it comes to food, many of them strive to pass this enjoyment of a healthy, diverse diet on to their offspring. We’re seeing a sophisticated twist even in foods designed for infants and toddlers, with unique flavor combinations such as strawberry, squash, and coconut – or navy beans, dates, chia, and coconut milk. Even yogurt is getting a veggie makeover with flavors such as purple carrot and sweet potato.
If you’re in the baby food market, you can’t go wrong focusing on veggies this year – and this isn’t a trend that’s likely to disappear anytime soon. As you’re developing new products, you can meet consumer demand by focusing on high vegetable content, organic ingredients, simple labels, and low-sugar baby food products.