Impact of consumer trends on feeding and eating behaviors in babies and toddlers

- Two major consumer trends having a large impact on millennial parents are a desire to feed babies homemade, natural, fresh foods and the grass roots feeding method, baby led weaning.
- Strategies including being a good role model during mealtime, offering rejected foods up to 10 times to allow for exploration and thus acceptance, avoiding pressure during mealtime, and offering a progression of texture to your child which matches their oral motor skills have shown to be effective for promoting healthy diets in children.
- Providing parents with commercial products, which offer a progression of texture each matched with a baby's evolving feeding skills, encourages a successful transition to table foods.
- Children have been shown to be more willing to try vegetables when presented in a self-feeding baby food pouch as opposed to an open bowl with a spoon. This is attributed to children not being able to see the vegetable color, mainly green.
- New innovation and creativity will be needed in the future to keep the next generation of parents happy and thus partner with them to raise healthy children.