How to get the most out of your Wholesome Box lunchbox kit

How it works

Our monthly lunchbox kits provide you with everything you need to create healthy, wholesome school lunches for your little one.

Each lunchbox kit includes two wholesome recipes (one savoury, one sweet) and the ingredients to create two delicious offerings for your child’s school lunchbox.

The kit also includes enough snacks for the month and some encouraging words of affirmation to include with your little one’s lunch.

All you then do is add fruit, veg and dairy to complete your little one’s wholesome lunchbox.  

Build each lunchbox around our Wholesome Lunchbox Formula

Our Wholesome Lunchbox formula is a handy blueprint to building delicious and nutritious lunchboxes, every day.

It covers off on all the nutrients your little one needs to grow and play throughout the day.

Here’s the formula: grains + protein + dairy + fruit + veggies + fat = the Wholesome Lunchbox.

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Let’s break down what each of these components is and how they help kids thrive:

• Grains: our source of energy
• Protein: to grow cells and repair the body
• Dairy: for healthy bones
• Fruit: for immune strength
• Veggies: for nutrients and immunity
• Fats: for energy and to absorb vitamins

Our top tips for building a wholesome lunchbox

Now that you’ve got the formula down pat, here’s our top tips for building your wholesome lunchbox:

1. Involve your children.
2. Keep it simple.
3. Keep it all bite-sized.
4. Fresh is best.
5. Think wholefoods.
6. Eat the rainbow.
7. Create Grab & Go boxes.
8. Keep it fun.

Keep your lunchbox bite-sized

Do you notice how often your little one comes home with their lunchbox full of food? That’s why we educate parents on creating a lunchbox around bite-sized portions.

Primary school aged children have a strict play and learning schedule, which usually follows something like this:

1. Roll call
2. Munch and crunch
3. Learning time
4. Lunchtime
5. Learning time
6. Afternoon tea
7. Pack up time

Children usually want to spend their break times playing, so they need to be able to grab and eat their food quickly and easily. 

They’re also more focused on playing than eating (I would know, I’m a primary school teacher!), so keeping it all bite-sized helps them to maximise both their playtime and nutrition.

It is also less overwhelming for children if their portions are kept small and means you aren’t wasting food by sending them to school with more than they can eat.

Create Grab & Go boxes for the fridge

Another big tip when preparing school lunches is to create Grab& Go fruit and veggie boxes at the start of each week.

This means washing and chopping up all your fruit and vegetable sand placing them in an easy-to-reach spot in the fridge, ready to pop into the lunchbox each morning.

You’ll be surprised at how much of a time-saver this tip is!  

We also have a dedicated spot in our fridge for things like yoghurt pouches, cheese sticks and other dairy items, making it super simple to add to our lunchboxes.

Batch cooking recipes for your freezer stash

When you receive your box each month, it’s handy to dedicate a couple of hours to batch cook the recipes for the freezer.

We love doing this on a Sunday afternoon, making us feel ready for the week ahead.

You could double or even triple your recipes for a big stash in freezer. Then you simply need to grab an item or two from your stash to build your lunchbox around.

Over time you can grow your repertoire of recipes, based on your monthly subscription, adding to your stash or creating other recipes from our recipe index.

Be mindful with your snacks

Keeping ‘bite-sized’ in mind, here’s our top tips for dishing out the snacks when building your wholesome lunchbox.

With our Wholesome Lunchbox Formula, most of your macro nutrients are covered off in both the savoury and sweet options we provide as your ‘mains’ for each lunchbox.

In each kit, we include enough ingredients to make batches of each recipe to add to your freezer stash for the month.

The snacks are the yummy added extras to add additional nutrition, yumminess and excitement to each lunchbox.

Many parents make the mistake of dishing out an entire snack in one serve e.g. a whole bag of popcorn in just one lunchbox.

This will just result in overwhelm for your child and a lunchbox returned home at the end of the day full of uneaten food.

So, keep all your snacks bite-sized too. This means dishing out one bag of popcorn across three days’ worth of lunchboxes, cutting that packet of seaweed into four serves or dishing out those freeze-dried berries into three serves.

Keeping all the snacks bite-sized will mean you get the most value for money from your Wholesome Box subscription and ensure that you child is full and satisfied each day, without the food waste.