Sunkist Fun Fruit. Grins Apple Slices, Smiles Orange Slices, Giggles Grapes, Pals Pineapple Wedges and Carrot Kidders. 69 cents to $1.09 per 1.3- to 4.7-ounce single-serve bag.
Bonnie: I'm in love with Sunkist Fun Fruit. Seriously, I love these prepacked cut and/or prepared fruits that are hitting shelves just in time to pack them into back-to-school lunches. They have fun names (Grins, Giggles and Smiles), and the pineapple is even fun to eat. It's another squeezable tube, but this one contains nutritious fruit rather than the usual refined sugar-chemical purported "treat." Each Fun Fruit is also easy to open, and is just the right amount and size of fruit for a young child.
It's about time, Sunkist!
Carolyn: You can give kids healthy food, but you can't make them eat it. The Boston school system learned that from its trash cans, which, at the end of the lunch periods, were filled with the whole oranges and apples they were handing out with hot lunches. The kids didn't hate the fruit; they just wanted it cut up and packaged as appealingly as candy and cookies.
This was the problem Boston presented to Sunkist. Its solution, Fun Fruit, has been so successful in schools that the company is now beginning to introduce them in supermarkets.
In Fun Fruit parlance, individual bags of mouth-sized orange wedges are dubbed Smiles, grapes are Giggles, apple slices are Grins, and skinny pineapple Pals come in vertical bags that double as push-up-pop-like holders. Not only are these fruit pieces attractively packaged, convenient and low in calories, they also taste good. (The apple slices also remained crunchy, even after a week in my fridge, due to their modern, modified-atmosphere packaging.)
Other fresh produce companies already sell individual bags of apple slices and carrots or celery with dip. But Sunkist's savvy expansion of this idea doesn't just include Smiles and Grins: It merits them.
Honey Maid Soft Baked Snack Bars. Oatmeal Raisin, Blueberry, and Banana. $3.39 per 10.4-ounce box of eight bars.
Bonnie: Nabisco just put its Honey Maid brand name on soft-baked snack bars. Like Honey Maid Cookies, these feature oatmeal rather than the brand's original graham. To be precise, these are soft oatmeal cookies in bar form. One has about 150 calories, 4 to 4.5 grams of fat (2 saturated), only 1 gram of fiber and 14 to 15 grams, or more than a tablespoon, of sugar in each near-1-ounce bar. That's comparable in calories to Honey Maid Oatmeal Cookies, but with 1.5 fewer grams of fat.
These bars do have some real fruit (mostly raisins and dried apples, with some blueberries and banana) and 6 grams of whole grains. They don't contain enough to be considered a good source of either.
Carolyn: Most cereal bars taste and eat fake, and there's a good reason: They're something companies like Kellogg invented to unload their cereal now that most people don't eat breakfast at home.
Honey Maid snack bars are soft, like cereal bars, but taste more real. That's not just because I love the oatmeal that is this bar's primary grain — even the blueberry and banana fillings taste like those fruits.
The bar with raisins is like a big, soft oatmeal cookie and therefore the best.
Lunchables Lunch Combinations Chicken Shake-Ups. BBQ, and Nacho Cheese. $2.49 per 11.45-ounce box containing chicken nuggets, seasoning, Kool-Aid Jammers 10 Juice Drink and a Jell-O Pudding Stick.
Bonnie: When did we start teaching our kids to play with their food? It certainly wasn't the way I was raised. But kids are supposed to play with these new Chicken Shake-Ups. Specifically, they're supposed to open a Ziploc bag of five silver-dollar-sized chicken nuggets, pour in a packet of seasoning, reseal it (if they remember), and shake to coat the chicken. These Lunchables also come with a Jell-O Pudding Stick and Kool-Aid Jammers 10 drink — two other items sure to end up on your kids' clothes.
I'm glad that this offers modest calories (210), sodium (470 to 560 milligrams) and fat (6 grams). I'm less thrilled with the 4 teaspoons of sugar and as many chemicals as some chemistry sets. And I'm most concerned about what Shake-Ups don't offer: fiber, whole grains, or fresh fruits and vegetables.
Do your kids a favor, and pack them a more wholesome lunch of a turkey or chicken sandwich on whole-grain bread, along with grape tomatoes, vegetable slices and fresh-cut fruit.
Carolyn: Chicken McNuggets meet Shake 'n' Bake in this new Lunchables boxed meal for kids. As Bonnie just explained, the main event is "precooked, nugget-shaped chicken patties" with a seasoning packet that kids are supposed to pour in a bag and shake. That's an abbreviated version of box instructions Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Step 4, "eat it," might seem obvious until you see one of these puffy, watery, orange- or red-hued things.
But kids better eat the nuggets, because if they don't, a 10-calorie diet drink and a pudding stick are all that's left for lunch.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods That Changed the Way We Eat" (Quirk). Each week they critique three new food items. © Universal Press Syndicate