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This article was published 26/08/2025 (277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Packing school lunches for kids is not for the faint of heart.

A packed lunch has to fulfil three criteria: it has to be nutritionally balanced, it has to be safe for school and it has to be easy to eat.

Parents everywhere know what a struggle it is when it comes to ticking all those boxes.

It’s a thankless task and yet we rise to the challenge daily, creating nourishing, delicious and appealing meals for our brood of small but mighty food inspectors.

On the surface the choices available seem limitless.

Grocery shelves are full of pre-packaged boxes of granola bars, individual bags of tiny cookies and trays of fruit leathers, emblazoned with the all-important “school-safe” label, as food coming from home has to adhere to strict food allergen policies.

These can differ from district to district and sometimes even from school to school, so it’s often easier to buy items that steer clear of the top nine allergens — milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soy and sesame.

But a quick peek at the food labels can be alarming, revealing lunch kits with high levels of sodium, sugars and saturated fats.

It’s no wonder then that parents keep going back to trusty old favourites, although even those can sometimes fall out of favour.

We’ve all been there, unzipping carefully prepared lunchboxes at the end of a school day only to be greeted by barely touched sweaty sandwiches, fermenting fruit stewing in its own juices and tiny teeth marks on a cake discarded for being:

a) too crumbly
b) too cakey
c) too chocolatey
d) all of the above

Tangerines are adored one day and rejected the next for being “too juicy,” crackers shunned for being the “wrong kind,” and roll-ups, previously a fail-safe way to introduce new fillings to suspicious children, coldly disregarded.

Even the most patient and creative caregiver will feel tested.

“It’s definitely a challenge trying to come up with ideas for lunches, and then trying to figure out how to make it healthy as well as something they want to eat is an added challenge,” says Sarah Reimer, who makes lunches for her children Ben, 6 and Paislee, 8.

“I usually make their snacks the same but often pack different lunches — the big part of their packed bag — for each of them. It’s definitely hard to find that balance between healthy and delicious.”

Let’s face it: packing school lunches shouldn’t feel like a competitive sport, but more often than not that’s exactly how it feels.

So we decided to make it one.

We invited three chefs from Lil’ Chef Institute, a cookery school in Winnipeg for children, to create a school lunch that fulfilled the following conditions:

• Allergen-free
• Does not require reheating (holds up well throughout the day)
• Follows Canada’s Food Guide recommendations (½ veggie, ¼ protein, ¼ grains)
• Easy to pack
• Delicious

Sophie Fiola, director of Lil’ Chef Institute, roped in her consulting head chef Sharron Park and lead instructor Elisa de Jesus to think outside the (lunch) box in order to satisfy our notoriously fussy judges.

The task was to make three classic lunches: two cold and one hot. Each lunch would have to introduce a “surprise me” element, incorporating something unexpected or creative while still meeting the allergen guidelines.

The lunches were then presented to our young panel — Paislee, 8, Faith, 9, and Aria, 10 — who judged them on a number of criteria (see box for judging sheet).

The children tried each lunch in turn, sampling every element and discussing which items they liked the best before making their final decisions.

Marks out of 10 were awarded for taste, visual appeal, ease of eating, familiarity of foods and the “surprise me” element, with a bonus 50 points awarded to the chef whose lunch the children would consider taking to school.

The results were unanimous.

Fiola’s lunch of chicken, bean and corn taquitos served with salsa and guacamole, side of carrots and sweet peas and a horchata-inspired rice pudding was crowned the winner.

“I liked trying all the different things in the different lunchboxes. Each box had something I enjoyed,” Aria said.

“The box I liked the most was Sophie’s because I liked everything in it,” Faith added. “I also really liked crumble in the second box. I could eat that every day.”

Paislee was delighted at how much she enjoyed the fibre-packed lentil buns, piping up to say, “My brother Ben would like these, too, because he needs more fibre!”

To make Fiola’s winning lunch go to lilchefinstitute.com for the recipe.

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca