Today's review is of Little Quacker Rice Biscuits- strawberry flavour. Props to Little Quacker for the name and the duck logo (although speech pathologist might be eye rolling at the deliberate mispronunciation!)
🔶Ingredients:
🔹Organic rice flour, organic sugar, salt, organic natural strawberry flavour, citric acid, gelatin, purple carrot juice.
🔹The flour, sugar and flavour may be organic, but this doesn't make them any more nutritious than regular ingredients.
🔹Strawberry flavour is also a little unclear. I'm not sure whether this actually comes from strawberries, contains sweetener or is just a strawberry essence.
🔶The positives:
🔹Fat and saturated fat content is almost negligible, which obviously fits within healthy guidelines
🔹Gluten, dairy, egg and nut free for kids with allergies (as are other rice crackers)
🔶The negatives:
🔹$75 per kilo. 20c per biscuit. Doesn't sound like much, but regular rice crackers are about $22 per kilo and 4c per biscuit.
🔹Sodium content of 319mg/100g. Technically this isn't a 'high' salt product but it's definitely not a low salt food. In fact, it's got as much sodium as pizza or cheddar flavoured rice crackers. Now that's not what you'd be expecting in a sweet biscuit!
🔹Sugar content exceeds healthy guidelines by about a third. The addition of sugar and juice contributes to this total. In two biscuits you only get 1g of sugar, but that's just because a biscuit weighs only 2.5g. This isn't something you need in a "kid's" biscuit (I also don't agree with "kid" specific food but that's a story for another day).
🔶The marketing:
🔹'Oven baked' This tells me nothing useful but is obviously designed to suggest it's a healthy option (which isn't guaranteed just by baking it in an oven).
🔹'The perfect balance between nutrition and taste'. Well this is debatable. These biscuits aren't too bad, but there's very little nutrition in them.
🔹The 'organic' label is plastered all over the product. That's great, but remember that organic doesn't mean more nutritious.
.
🔶The alternatives:
🔹Regular rice crackers that cost less!
🔹If your child prefers a sweet taste then a dry cereal like Cheerios might be an option. Otherwise you could use a chia jam to add fibre and sweetness to plain crackers.
🔹Overall, this isn't an incredibly undesirable product from a nutritional point of view- I just don't think it's got enough positives to be worth the price tag!
About Mealtime Building Blocks
Dr Kyla Smith is a paediatric dietitian specialising in fussy eating, feeding difficulties and childhood nutrition. Lauren Pike is an occupational therapist working in fussy eating and feeding difficulties. They have a private practice called Mealtime Building Blocks in Perth, Western Australia. You can connect with Kyla and Lauren on their website and sign up for their newsletter, and the Facebook page or on the Instagram page. You can also email them.
