Why Homemade is Better Than Supermarket Foods for a Healthy Vegan Lunch Box for your Vegan Kids

When it comes to getting the most nutrition for your buck in your vegan kids’ school lunch boxes, homemade snacks and foods beat supermarket foods every time. Not only are homemade foods more nutritious overall, but they also cost less, and you have a lot more flexibility in the ingredients. 

More Nut Free Options for Your Vegan Lunch Box

Now that more and more schools are going nut free, one of the biggest challenges when trying to find vegan lunch box foods for your kids is to find vegan and  nut free options. The majority of vegan snacks in supermarkets these days contain nuts, so you can end up with a very limited range of options for your kids. Luckily, when you make vegan lunch box recipes yourself at home, you can easily swap nuts for seeds. Sunflower and pumpkin seeds both make great swaps for other nuts, and they are super packed full of nutrition, too! You can even make them into a seed butter, and use that in place of peanut butter or other nut butters. 

Homemade Vegan Lunch Box Foods Have More Nutrients Than Supermarket

While many supermarket foods boast of having “superfood” ingredients like quinoa, chia seeds, or even spinach, when you actually look at the ingredients on the back of the packet, you’ll often discover that they have less than 2% of that ingredient – hardly enough to give your vegan kids any decent nutrition! The majority of supermarket snacks tend to be filled with rice, wheat flour, and oils – all foods that are filling, but have very little nutritional content. When you make your own vegan lunch box foods at home, however, you can pack them full of wholemeal flour, oats, pumpkin seeds (my favourite!), veggies and other seeds, and have them packed full of essential nutrients like iron, zinc, calcium, and even protein. 

Homemade Vegan Lunch Box Snacks are Cheaper

One of the biggest advantages of making your own vegan lunch box snacks is that they end up being a lot cheaper! I did a cost comparison of my Nut Free Muesli Bars, vs a packet of Supermarket muesli bars. 

Cost of Nut Free Muesli Bars

• Pumpkin seeds: $4 packet (use quarter)
• Oats: $1.40 (use ¼)
• Rice Puffs: $5 (¼ packet)
• Rice Malt Syrup: $3.80 (use ¼)
• Vanilla Extract: $10 (use 1/30) $0.33
• Sunflower Seeds: $1.20 (1 packet)

$4.75 to make (10 bars per recipe)

$0.48 per bar

Supermarket Muesli Bars

$5 for packet of 6

$0.85 cents each

As you can see, the supermarket muesli bars are nearly double the price! So making your own is going to save you a lot of money in the long run.

And finally, when you make your own vegan lunch box foods at home, you just have more flexibility in general. You can switch up cookie and muffin flavours, add nutrient boosters if your kids need more iron or zinc, and control how much sugar and oil are in each of your recipes. 

Homemade Vegan Lunch Boxes Don’t Have to Be Hard!

I know that it can feel overwhelming to have to make your vegan lunch box snacks every week, so that’s why I’ve put together the Vegan Lunchbox Vault. Inside, you get 20 done for you weekly lunchbox plans which give you recipes, prep ahead instructions and nutrition breakdowns, which will mean you have nutrient packed lunchboxes ready in just an hour each week. You also get access to over 200 nut free vegan recipes, so your kids will never run out of options! If you’d like to find out more, you can check out the Vegan Lunchbox Vault here.