Fun Baby Food Combinations Your Child Will Love

For years, baby food companies have been compromising on the nutrition front and the flavor front. While many companies seem to offer combinations of multiple flavors and ingredients, they often continue to use one main ingredient like pumpkin or sweet potato and add a smaller amount of a second ingredient like spinach. 

This is not only boring and bland, but it deprives your little one of the nutrition they need.

We want to nourish the next generation as best as we can! By giving your baby combinations of baby food ingredients you can begin introducing new flavors, textures, and a well-rounded variety of nutrients in their diet so they grow and thrive.

Whether you make baby food from home or buy baby food from the grocery store, here are some combinations to try.

Benefits of Combinations

When your little one first begins solids, they’ll eat single ingredient foods. But after a month or two, they move on to combinations. Let’s talk about why baby food combinations are beneficial to your babe’s health.

Combinations Develop Your Babe’s Palette

One of the biggest benefits of combination baby food is that it develops your little one’s palette. Their palette involves two parts. Their taste palette, which is their exposure to new flavors and tastes, and their texture palette, which is their level of exposure to new textures such as fibers, seeds, skins, or mashed ingredients.

Why is it so important to develop your little one’s taste palette? There are a few reasons.

First, a well-rounded palette leads to more exposure to new foods and healthier foods in your baby’s future. This concept was developed by scientists who discovered that the first 1,000 days of nutrition are the most vital to a person’s health and nutrition. In other words, what your baby eats now sets the stage for what they will eat in the future.

The baby food companies that use the same main foods while only changing small amounts of ingredients set the stage for poor nutrition. If your little one eats the same things over and over—whether you know it or not—they will not be ready for a well-rounded variety of nutrition in the future.

In addition to setting the stage for future nutrition, introducing your baby to a variety of foods, textures, and flavor combinations helps prevent pickiness in the future. This may require introducing a new flavor or food to your babe anywhere from 10 to 15 times before they embrace it but keep trying. It can save you lots of future struggle.

Combinations Provide a Variety of Nutrients

An apple is packed with nutrition. In just one apple you will find fiber, Vitamin A, Vitamin D, calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin C, Iron, Vitamin B-6, Potassium, Sodium, healthy fats, and Carbs. But despite the nutritional content of an apple, you surely wouldn’t limit your diet to just this one food?

If you only eat the same things over and over, your body will miss out on the rest of the nutrition it needs. An apple cannot provide much protein, antioxidants, omega-3s, folate, or other essential nutrients the human body needs. Neither can any food on its own. This is why combinations are so important!

By combining ingredients together, you can ensure that your babe gets all the nutrients they need. From one side of the nutrition spectrum to the other.

Plus, combinations don’t have to be complicated. Just like you add ingredients to a meal to enhance flavor and nutrition, you can add ingredients to baby food and viola, you’ve got a delicious and nutritious culinary masterpiece your babe will love!

Combinations are Fun

Lastly, combinations are just plain fun. Your baby’s first years are full of important developmental milestones. Having fun is part of these milestones. Your baby begins interacting with the world through play, touch, and exploring curiosity. While they’re busy having fun, it’s important to provide them with fun foods too!

This doesn’t necessarily mean that mealtime turns into game time. But, it’s easy to make mealtime fun by exploring new flavor combinations together.

Combination Baby Food to Try

Whether you cook homemade baby food from home, shop at your local grocery store, or are exploring the combinations on our menu, here are some of our favorite flavor combos to try.

Carrot and Raspberry

One delicious combination we added to our Stage 3 menu is our carrot and raspberry puree. Stage 3 foods are slightly thicker than stage 1 and 2 and should be introduced at around seven months old. This baby food is a fun first combo for your little one to enjoy.

Carrots are known for being rich in nutrients that support eye health, heart health, immune system function, skin resilience, and provide a wide variety of vitamins and minerals that support growth and development. Raspberries offer vitamins, antioxidants, fiber, acids, and other nutrients that support the body’s organs, functions, and help keep us healthy. 

They are rich in calcium, fibers, protein, and energy.

Peas, Cauliflower, and Mint

Another combination we love contains peas, cauliflower, and mint! Find this baby food in our Minty Green Pea Soup. This combination is bursting with flavor and nutrition. With peas, cauliflower, rutabaga, mint, nutritional yeast, and parsley, your little one will love this baby food combination.

This combination is from our Stage 4 menu and can be introduced to your little one at around 8 months. This flavor combo is packed with Vitamins A, K, and C, as well as riboflavin, niacin, Vitamin B6, thiamin, folate, phosphorus, and zinc to support your babe’s health and growth. Plus, this soup is chunkier and helps develop their texture palette as well!

Root Medley Combinations

Another yummy combination your baby will love is our Root Medley Combo! This baby food contains butternut squash, purple sweet potato, apple, coconut milk, oregano, rosemary, thyme, cinnamon, vanilla, and nutmeg to make a flavor-packed, nutrition-dense pinchable puree.

As far as nutrients go, this combination is packed with a strong basis of essential nutrients such as protein and fiber. It also contains 90% of your baby’s daily value of calcium, 20% of their iron requirements, and 40% of how much potassium they need.

Once your little one is 10 months or older, you can introduce this pinchable combination into their diet.

Squash and Quinoa

Squash and Quinoa is another great combination for babies who are 10 months and older. It contains butternut squash, quinoa, kale, flax seed, nutritional yeast, and spirulina for tons of nutrition and flavor. For instance, this baby food is a rich source of calcium, iron, potassium, fiber, and healthy fats.

This baby food flavor combo has more benefits than just flavor and nutrition. Quinoa has many benefits. It is a gluten free source of all the amino acids your babe’s body needs to synthesize proteins. It is rich in folate, phosphorus, and manganese. Plus, it’s a great alternative to rice or other grains that contain dangerous levels of heavy metals.

There are many ways to avoid heavy metals and protect your baby by giving them organic, heavy metal-free ingredients, and quinoa is a great option!

What to Do in The Face of Rejection

If you’re a parent, you’re probably familiar with this face. Maybe your child grimaces. Maybe they spit food out. Maybe they stick out their tongue or push the spoon away. If your little one has shown any of these signs that they don’t like food, they may just need more time with it before they fall in love.

Here’s the thing. Change is scary. Especially for little ones who are encountering new things each day! Your little one is using their five senses to interact and learn about the world, so tasting new flavors and textures may be scary at first.

The key to introducing new foods into your little one’s diet is repeated exposure. By repeatedly exposing your babe to a new food you can slowly introduce it and get them used to the new flavor or texture. 

It may take over a dozen tries, but don’t be discouraged! Keep at it, and soon your little one will be begging for more!