Complementary feeding challenges: Insights from Swiss parents' perspectives.

Parents play a crucial role in deciding what foods to introduce to their infants during the transition from milk to solids. This study examined the challenges they face, including adherence to official complementary feeding recommendations and the struggles and concerns across different stages of feeding. Specifically, this study focused on the initial stage (transition from breastmilk/formula to mashed foods), middle stage (consumption of mashed foods and some fingerfoods, transitioning towards family foods) and late stage (complete transition to family diet). Findings from 22 semi-structured interviews with Swiss parents reveal that, despite being well-informed, practical obstacles such as returning to work, limited time for preparing homemade foods, managing multiple children, and food preferences often hinder adherence. Safety concerns like allergies and choking were prominent early on but decreased as infants grew older and parents gained confidence. In the middle phase, concerns shifted towards pesticides, indicating a growing awareness of food quality. Maintaining a healthy diet was a constant concern, with early reassurance from breastfeeding or formula feeding giving way to worries about balanced nutrition as solids became more prominent. Time constraints were particularly significant in the first two stages, due to the effort of preparing small amounts of mash and later cooking separate meals. Tailored support and clear communication can help parents navigate these challenges and promote healthier feeding practices.

Current and emerging trends in cereal snack bars: implications for new product development.

The change in consumers' lifestyle promoted "snackification" favouring the commercialisation of on-the-go products such as cereal bars (CBs). Manufacturers are encountering challenges to develop healthy, natural, tasty, and affordable CBs. This article focuses on production methods, the current and emerging market trends, and practical implications for developing new CBs. The future of the CBs industry is associated with finding the right balance between nutritional value, sensory attributes, naturalness, and sustainability. Manufactures have a toolbox with a large portfolio of ingredients and processing techniques to develop CBs that can be a meal substitute, a supplement, or a snack.

Beliefs, Evaluations, and use of commercial infant Food: A survey among German parents.

Complementary feeding is a critical milestone for parents, who must decide the extent to which they feed their infants with homemade foods (HMFs) or commercial infant foods (CIFs). The current study focused on how parents perceive and evaluate CIFs and what drives them to use these products. Understanding the wide variety of factors that influence parents' decisions to use CIFs as a food source is crucial to helping them make more balanced food choices for their infants. Data from an online survey with 858 German parents revealed their negative perceptions of CIFs, particularly in terms of nutritional quality and texture, and concerns that CIFs contain higher levels of pesticides and heavy metals compared to HMFs, despite acknowledging the expertise of the infant nutrition industry. These perceptions were likely to be driven by the 'natural-is-better' belief and parents' desire for control over the ingredients in their infants' meals, contributing to their skepticism towards CIFs. Additionally, our study found that while many parents know traditional nutrition guidelines, they are less familiar with recent updates. Parents' benefit beliefs about CIFs and parents' trust in the food industry strongly influenced the use of CIFs, while infant age and parent gender had a less strong, yet significant influence on CIFs consumption. Overall, the present study offers new quantitative insights into the factors that motivate parents to use CIFs. Furthermore, it underscores the need for health authorities to improve their communication strategies towards parents concerning new dietary guidelines.

Baby, children, and adult biscuits. Differences in nutritional quality and naturalness.

This study examined and compared the nutritional quality and degree of naturalness between baby biscuits (<3 years), children biscuits (>3 years), and adult biscuits. Mintel's Global New Products Database was searched for "Baby Biscuits & Rusks" and "Sweet Biscuits/Cookies" (re)launched between July 2019 and July 2022 in four European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom), which resulted in 1280 products to be analyzed. Nutritional quality was measured by means of nutrient values per 100 g, and baby biscuits were assessed for compliance with the World Health Organization's latest Nutrient and Promotion Profile Model (NPPM). Degree of naturalness was measured using the food naturalness index (FNI). Baby biscuits had the best nutritional quality and were the most natural as compared to children and adult biscuits, but their energy density and sugar content require further attention. Nutritional quality was comparably poor in children and adult biscuits, and children biscuits were the least natural of the three groups. The NPPM requirements of not adding any free sugar at all to baby biscuits may drive parents to purchase alternative sweeter biscuits originally formulated and meant for children and adults. Reasonable regulations are needed to support product (re)formulations and to improve the current market food offer for babies and children.

Less Sugar and More Whole Grains in Infant Cereals: A Sensory Acceptability Experiment With Infants and Their Parents.

There is an urgent need to reduce sugar intake in early childhood. Commercial infant cereals are among the first solid foods introduced to infants at the beginning of the complementary feeding period in most countries. The aim of this study was to examine infants' overall acceptability of low-sugar complementary cereals. To do so, a between-subjects experimental study with 165 parents and their infants aged 6-24 months was conducted where one group tested a high-sugar refined cereal (21 g/100 g), and the other a low-sugar cereal (<1 g/100 g) with 50% of whole grain, which represented a 95.2% decrease in sugar content. We found no significant differences between the two groups in terms of infants' overall acceptability (infant's reaction, estimated intake and relative intake). Importantly, infants' reactions to high- and low-sugar cereals were not influenced by the time that infants had been consuming sweet cereals (15-25% sugar) before the experiment took place. In addition, parent's overall liking and sensory evaluation (sweetness, color, taste, texture, and aroma) was positive and very similar in both groups. Overall, our findings show that it is feasible to reduce sugar content in infant cereals without sacrificing its sensory acceptability by infants and their parents. This represents a good opportunity for the infant food industry to adhere to current healthy and sustainable demands of lowering the sugar intake leading to important benefits in infants' health, without compromising competitiveness in the market.