Starting Baby Food

We're going to be starting baby food now that my LOs are 6 months old. We've been doing the rice cereal and they do great with it. I'm planning on making some of my own baby food and also buying some commercial baby food.


Some questions:


1) Where did you find baby food to be the cheapest? (Target, grocery store, Walmart)

2) Which brand do you like?

3) At 6 months, do we start with the stage 1 purees? (My babies do well on fairly thick rice cereal with regular applesauce mixed in).

 

Babyfood was cheapest here at Wal-Mart. I got a mixture of the Wal-Mart brand and Gerber. Really I just got a bunch of variety b/c my girls were very picky eaters so I never knew what they would eat! Yes, at 6 months old I would start with the purees and my pedi said to start with the veggies first, b/c if you start with the sweet fruits they won't want to take the veggies.

GL!

 

I found Wal-mart to usually be the cheapest with baby food, although I did go to Target the other day and found that the Stage I & II foods are exactly the same price as they were at Wal-mart. Our boys eat Gerber baby food, it's the cheapest. We did try beechnut for a while and my boys hated it! Don't know why, I'm sure it's just fine. At 6 months I might start with the Stage II foods (if they're sitting up & maybe even if they aren't.) The stage II foods are an oz bigger and they're 10 cents cheaper! Somebody tell me why that is! They're not even that much thicker than the Stage I. I would start on veggies first, then move to fruit. If you end up buying stage II food, I would start with the plain fruits & veggies (pears, sweet potatoes, green beans, peas, bananas, squash) and leave the mixed fruits/veggies until they've tried all of those.

 

I agree with Amy stage one veggies first. If you make them at home just pureed them really good and add a little water, breastmilk, or formula, if they seem to thick.

 

we do organics so i haven't found the price varies all that much from store to store. earth's best brand is my preference, which is around 75 cents per jar.

your cheapest option is definitely to make your own. i make 99% of what my boys eat, including yogurt. i've done a cost analysis per ounce and there's just no comparison at all. especially when you're talking about yobaby versus the cost of a half gallon of milk to make yogurt yourself. the only time they get commercial babyfood is when they're getting meat. i just never got the hang of meat puree and i can't seem to make it tolerable to their tastebuds.

 

For the most part walmart is cheaper around here, unless I find a sale. Watch for sales, grocery stores will sometimes have good deals on 10 jars at a time.

I prefer the gerber brand, but I do have some beech-nut here (sale).

The stage 1 and stage 2 are the same thickness, but a bigger container and more varieties, so it's probably cheaper to buy the bigger stage 2's.

 

1) Where did you find baby food to be the cheapest? (Target, grocery store, Walmart)
Walmart was the cheapest around here.

2) Which brand do you like?
I usually bought the Gerber ones, but I also bought some of the Earth's Best organic ones.

3) At 6 months, do we start with the stage 1 purees? (My babies do well on fairly thick rice cereal with regular applesauce mixed in).
Yes, we started with the stage 1's . Our doctor recommended starting with the orange vegetables, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes...

 

I did a mix of making my own and buying Gerber. Gerber sent me coupons and look on the inside of the cardboard in the two packs as there is usually a coupon there too. I bought almost all of ours at the military grocery store. I also bought it at Walmart. Target will sometimes have coupons and it will even out to a Walmart price. At least it used to. We didn't start solids until 7 months for my preemies, but we did rice, oatmeal, mixed grain cereals then orange veggies, green veggies, yellow veggies before doing meats and then fruits. We did a new food for a week (but most do a new food every 3-4 days). Once we knew the boys could handle it, we started doing mixes like apple/pear/banana (a super easy one to do at home) and chicken and apples. The stuff I made at home was more like Stage 2 so I started buying those after about a month on Stage 1. Check out the FY Handbook for more info on starting solids!

 

We started with stage 1 at 4 months for BK and 5 months for Aurora. Now, we're onto stage 2 and some table foods. I've always bought Gerber and found that Target has the best price here...they're usually on sale every few weeks and I stock up. Also, target will put the DHA added stuff on clearance from time to time so it's 68 cents/jar.

I know I'm outnumbered on this, but our pedi said NOT to start with just veggies and NOT to go by color. She actually wanted us to mix it up. Our girls are fair skinned and she said that if they got nothing but sweet potatoes and carrots for a week, they would turn orange. Sure enough, look around at church or day care sometime and you can tell if a kid has had only orange or yellow food.

That said, I did mix it up and they did great. In fact, BK prefers green peas over anything fruit I've tried to give her. Now, they have oatmeal for breakfast, fruit for lunch and veggies for dinner. They hardly ever finish the fruit, but always finish the veggies. Just remember to make feeding time fun and they'll do great!

 

At 5 months I really started feeding solids. Before that they just didn't seem to care, but they weren't crazy about the rice cereal so I started the Gerber purees. Wal Mart definitely seems to be the cheapest and now at 6 months we've tried all the stage 1's. I introduce a new food every 2 - 3 days to watch for a reaction even though any food allergy should present itself within 4 hours of eating that food. I tried peas first and then fruits and then some more veggies. I've never had a problem feeding fruit and then veggies. At this young age, it's unlikely they will know/want to reject a vegetable two days after they've had a fruit. Good luck and take lots of pictures. The faces they make are priceless when trying new foods!

 

1) Where did you find baby food to be the cheapest? (Target, grocery store, Walmart)
target and walmart are generally the cheapest i've found, but whenever i find a sale on baby food i buy about 50 at a time.

2) Which brand do you like?
i really like gerber, its got a nice smooth consistency. the dominics brand organics was onsale so we tried that just today. it makes for a really easy feed.

3) At 6 months, do we start with the stage 1 purees? (My babies do well on fairly thick rice cereal with regular applesauce mixed in).
we actually started with the stage 2's. personally i didnt realise there was a differance except in size until now. i always made their cereal pretty lumpy and thick though, they seemed to like it better that way, so its never been a problem.

sweet potato is always a good starter. it rarely presents a problem for people with allergies. check it out.

 

1) I made my own food so I'm not sure about where it's cheaper although Wal Mart seems to be winning in that department! I did find some items like the Mott's Unsweetened Apple Sauce was so much cheaper than buying my own apples and pureeing them that I just went with that instead.

2) I really like the www.wholesomebabyfoods.com website and also 100 Top Baby Food Purees by Annabel Karmel. It answered a lot of my questions about what is okay to freeze and how long it's good for etc. I purchased Baby Cubes for storing the food and still use them now. I used a Magic Bullet for pureeing then switch to a food processor when making bigger batches of food.

3)After the cereals I started with carrots, sweet potato, banana, pears and peas. As for the consistency I would just add more or less water when pureeing to get to the desired consistency. If my girls were gagging, then I would just thin it out a bit more.