9 Kid Snacks That Sound Weird But Are F'ing Awesome

How many packs of Bunny Grahams and Pirate Booty are you planning to buy in your lifetime? 800? 8000? 800,000? If you’re like us, we’re guessing you’re well on your way to hitting that number, the big one, and deep inside you’re silently screaming, “Please, no more.”

Is there no other crunchy snack out there we can feed our kids (and, yes, ourselves) and feel ok about? A snack that doesn’t have a terrifying amount of saturated fat, sodium, and sugar? One that isn’t jammed with a heinously long ingredient list that would make Michael Pollan shake his finger and whisper, “Uh-uh. No.”

The answer is yes, those healthy-crunchy-AND-delicious snacks do exist in the world. But too often they’re hiding behind bizarre branding choices that make you walk right on by and reach for the Bunny Grahams yet again.

Today, we bring you a spanking new Crunch Time Parents roundup of favorite crunchy-yet-virtuous supermarket snacks. As it happens, these snacks are on the weird side, because you know about all the "normal" ones. We like these snacks a lot. An informal focus group of toddlers and adultish people love them too, although some like certain ones more than others. Try them. Tell us what you think. Here goes:

Peanut Butter Puffins This is technically a cereal, true, but we like these puffs straight out of the box. The peanut butter-milk combo in the cereal bowl is a taste we're still acquiring, but we're hooked on these as a snack to gorge on sans milk. We're totally ok doling fistfuls of these to our kids as they careen around the playground: There's only whole-grain oats, peanut butter, and a handful of reassuringly basic ingredients in here. Cereal-wise, we're longtime fans of plain Puffins, eaten the classic bowl-and-milk way. 

Good Health Eat Your Vegetables Chips: Sour Cream and Onion This name will scare away toddlers, but then again toddlers can’t read. Call these whatever you want, and watch your kids happily, unwittingly consume a snack made with broccoli, kale, spinach, sweet potatoes, and four other vegetables. Eating veggies in the form of crunchy supermarket snacks isn't the same as eating a salad, true, but if your kid won’t eat salad yet, she’ll surely gobble these. We bet you will too.

Chickpeatos Baked Green Pea and Chickpea Puffs “Exactly like Lucky Charms marshmallows,” said one adult tester who tried these. We have to agree. We don’t know why a puff that isn’t a marshmallow, and that involves dried legumes, would taste like those tiny marshmallows in our elementary-school cereal. But it does. And we’re ok with that.

Snikiddy Organic Grilled Cheese Baked Puffs What’s grilled about these cheese puffs? Beats us, but the name is a branding coup, since who wouldn't reach for a grilled-cheese puff over a cheese puff? Admittedly, these puffs are good, really good. And like all the snacks on this list, they're not shabby on the health front, either, and include organic cheddar, organic corn, and non-fat milk. The photo below, by the way, is of actual grilled-cheese sandwiches, just for fun.

The Daily Crave White Cheddar Lentil Chips The marketing decision that spawned this legume-cheese-puff hybrid should’ve been disastrous. But oddly it worked out, more than we’re comfortable admitting. We found ourselves scraping the bottom of the bag within seconds, and you might even beat that record if you try these yourself.

Vegan Bob's Asparagus Chips We thought the kids would run screaming from these things, but no: They inhaled these. Granted, they had no idea about the asparagus since they're still illiterate. But the fetching black-specked chips and the umami-bomb flavor kept them coming back to the bag. The asparagus in here is asparagus powder, but we figure hey, it’s something. You also get flax seeds, chia seeds, quinoa, and a handful of other not-bad-at-all ingredients in here, so you win.

Snikiddy Organic Mac and Cheese Baked Puffs The kids we know are generally psyched to be fed plain old mac and cheese, and don’t need it disguised in the form of a puff. But as it turns out, kids are also delighted to snack on mac-and-cheese-inspired snacks. These are made by the same brand as the aforementioned Grilled Cheese Puffs and contain nearly the same ingredients (no pasta in here; it's just a name, kids). All in all, they’re virtuous enough for us not to feel guilty dealing bags and bags of these at snack time. 

Wild California Pineapple Coconut Crisps A pina colada in a chip. There’s no rum in here (sorry) but we’ll be damned if these aren’t some of the most ferociously addictive snacks we’ve had in a long while. The ingredient list involves grapeseed flour, along with other ingredients we feel totally ok about: honey, buttermilk, dried pineapple, and a few others. Saturated fat content is a not-bad 12 percent, considering. Stick an umbrella in the bag, find a real or imaginary beach, and hand your kids a few crisps while you make the rest disappear very rapidly. Oh, where did those crisps go? Kids, run along and look for them, ok? Bye.

Giraffe photo (top) by Mark Dumont via Wikimedia Commons.

Grilled cheese photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Pina colada photo by Wine Dharma via Unsplash.