Research

Ask

I interviewed three delightful people about kids snacking habits: Sammi, Kris, and Samantha. Since I tailored each set of questions to the person who was being interviewed, each person has their own section. I also tried to gain information about my sub theme, attitudes towards (environmentally) healthy snacks- but I wanted to keep the discussion flowing, so a great deal of the converstations focused more on healthy snacks and convincing kids to eat them, instead of environmental concerns of snacking. Actually, I learned from my interviews and obsevation that people generally either don’t think about or don’t care about the environmental impacts of their snacks.

Sammi

Sammi and I walked around the Mill City farmer’s market before the interview, and enjoyed some delicious french toast from a local food truck.

Sammi is an old high school friend of mine and a summer camp counselor. She’s worked as a counselor for years, and last summer served as a coordinator and leadership director for the camp. As a camp coordinator, she was in charge of planning what kinds of snacks the kids ate every day, as well as what food was brought along on longer excursions like camping trips. She absolutely loves kids and food, and she happened to be in town for the weekend (she goes to school in Nashville,) so I thought she’d be a perfect candidate for an interviewee.

Sammi’s questions included:

Tell me about a memorable experience you’ve had snacking with children.

Do you notice a larger push towards more organic or raw foods, especially working with the kids from the wealthy families?

What happens to all the trash from the food at camp?

What improvements would you make to snacks to make them easier to serve at camp?

What kind of food do you bring on camping trips with the kids? What kind of factors influence the snack choices?

Sammi gave lots of really interesting insights about the snacking habits of kids at summer camp. We talked a lot about how parents will try to send healthy foods for their kids, but the kids go to extreme measures to avoid eating the healthy food! She also talked a lot about how having special diets is trendy right now; she told me a story about three popular high school girls at her camp who decided they wanted to be vegetarian because they wanted to stand out. They tried to use their trendy diet as social leverage. However, it was clear that they really didn’t care that much about what they ate, and buying extra vegetarian options was more expensive for the camp. The girls mainly ate junk food and snacks instead of the healthy vegetarian options anyway. She also explained that the camp tries to use reusable products when serving snacks to limit the trash they generate. However, sometimes the convenience of cheap snacks like freezies take higher priority over environmental concerns.

“When kids get pack their own lunch and snacks, they’ll come to camp with nothing but an apple and a snickers bar. And that’s not ok.”

“When parents do pack really healthy snacks or lunches, the kids will eat the healthy things and put the healthy food under the tables so the counselors don’t catch them not eating their salad or whatever.”

“We give them one snack per day, about an hour before their parents pick them up to get their sugar up, so they’re like ‘camp was so great!’ instead of worn out. So we give them really sugary snacks to make them more energetic.”

“Even with sweets and junk food, kids are super super picky. A lot of kids have to bring their own snacks for health reasons, or because they’re so picky.”

“One kid is super stick thin, and he eats multiple bowls of ice cream every day. (Kids) have this distorted idea of what they need to look like, but they don’t know how to achieve it in a healthy way.”

“When we offer snacks, we use reusable cups or bowls and silverware to limit the trash we generate.”

“In general, and especially for camping trips, we get whatever’s cheap.”

“Kids want to be unique, so they’re like, ‘oh, I don’t eat this.’”

Kris

Kris and her daughter, Samantha, were excited to be interviewed!

Kris is the mother of four kids (one of them who happens to be my boyfriend,) and a nurse practitioner. I thought she would be a good person to interview because she’s had lots of experience in finding snacks that kids like to eat, and she works in the health care field, so she might have some interesting insights into the realm of healthy snacking.

Questions included:

What kinds of snacks do you typically try to buy for your kids? Why?

What are some challenges of shopping for snacks?

What motivated you to try to shift towards a less processed food diet?

Kris talked about the struggles of finding easy, healthy snacks that her kids will still eat and enjoy. She said the main two concerns she has while shopping are what the kids will actually eat, and price. She also told some stories about how much her boys used to love the little video games that came in McDonald’s happy meals- she said they would drive out of their way just to get the new toy that came out with the meal.

“As a culture, we simply consume too much processed food. We try to get away from that, but it’s hard.”

“It’s much harder to control what our high schoolers eat than, say, what Sam eats. But Sam loves the processed food so much.”

“I just try to buy what they’ll eat. Snacks are expensive, so you don’t want to buy snacks no one will eat.”

“There was a period of time where John and I were very focused on only buying bulk foods, and strongly against prepackaged foods. But then we had kids and everything changed.”

“I just need someone who is nutritionally focused and also has time to prepare healthy, environmentally minded snacks.”

“If it has the word ‘organic’ on it, I’d be willing to spend more money on it.”

Samantha

Samantha is a seven year old who absolutely loves anything pink, playing outside, and chips and nacho cheese. I thought it would be fun and helpful to talk to a kid, since this assignment is about children’s snacking after all. While it was definitely a different experience talking to someone so young, it did give a unique perspective.

Samantha’s questions included:

Tell me about the last snack you had.

What are your favorite kinds of snacks? Why?

Tell me what snack time is like at school.

Do you think it’s important to eat healthy snacks? Why or why not?

Tell me something you don’t like about snacking.

Sam’s interview was difficult because she really just liked telling me about all the different snacks she loved to eat and had a hard time answering some of the questions. However, it was clear from the interview that she snacked a lot, and loved sugary processed snacks. While her family does buy a lot of healthy snacks and she knows they’re supposed to be better for her, she didn’t seem to really know why or have any real motivation for eating the healthy snacks other than just knowing it would make her parents happy.

“You know me, I’m a kid, I eat a lot of sugar.”

“I like being healthy!” Why? “Well I don’t really know why but I know it’s good and it makes my mom happy when I eat fruit!”

Observation

I observed families grocery shopping at super target. I went for the secret

This is a very creepy picture of one of the families I casually followed around Target. This guy had three boys and a little girl, and was impressively good at getting them to focus on the task at hand.

agent approach, pushing a cart and nonchalantly filling it with random food while I casually followed unsuspecting families around Target. Although I’ll admit it was a little creepy, it was surprisingly effective. I observed that lots of big families go shopping on Sunday mornings, although typically it’s only one parent with anywhere from one to five children tagging along. Naturally, these kids get bored and look for entertainment. Small children typically would point to colorful or exciting snacks that their usually obliging parents would then give to them to hold and look at. Some especially obliging parents even let the kids open the box and start snacking before the snack had been purchased! (These groups typically had the happiest shoppers.) Older kids actively helped the parent pick out the snacks for the week, which often led to heated arguments- one father even threatened to return a huge box of cookies if they were vetoed by Mom when the party returned home. Sometimes when these arguments did not end in the child’s favor, they would resort to other means, such as sneaking the item into the cart when the parent’s back was turned (this later led to more heated arguments in the checkout lane.) The most successful shopping strategy I witnessed was a father and his four children, who were probably somewhere between 5 to 11 years old. He would tell them what type of food they needed to find, and whoever found the healthiest, cheapest option got a point and got to put the item in the cart. I can only assume the winner got to pick out the unhealthy snack for the week or something like that, because his kids were super motivated to win the game, and helped make grocery shopping easy for Dad in the process.

Experience

For my experience, I snacked a lot of different places and made sure to pay conscious attention to how the environment impacted my snacking.

Snacking at work. I usually bring big bags of food like this granola and trail mix to work, because it lasts forever and is easy to snack on while I work on the computer. However, it worries me to eat snacks like these with my fingers at the same time that I’m typing because of all the germs I can only assume I’m eating!

Snacking in the car! I took this picture in the parking lot because snacking , driving, and photographing at the same time seemed like a bad idea. But car snacks need to be easy to open so they aren’t overly distracting.

I snack a lot in a typical week. Actually, I usually feel kind of bad about myself because I eat so many snacks and so little real food. I documented all the places I typically snack during the week, and thought about the experience in each place could be improved. For example, when I work I eat snacks packaged in bulk, but I feel gross when I’m working on the computer and snacking at the same time because all the germs from my keyboard are transferred to my snacks. Additionally I need snacks that are easy to open and don’t spill all over my car for when I’m eating while driving. And finally, I often only have a few minutes in my apartment between classes, so some sort of snack that replaces a meal that I can just grab and go would make my life a lot easier.

Storyboard

The sneaky kid puts taboo junk food in the shopping cart which results in a checkout lane battle.

Major Insights

The source of the insight in included in parentheses.

Kids want to stand out. Having special dietary needs helps them do this. (Sammi)

Kids need to like the snacks they’re given. They will go to large measures to avoid eating snacks they dislike or think are uncool. (Sammi)

Kids get bored grocery shopping, and find entertainment in looking at exciting packaging or actually eating the snacks in the store. (Observations)

People typically don’t care enough about the environment to seek out environemtally friendly snacking options unless they’re cheaper. (Kris)

Labels are important. Parents feel like they’re doing a better job being a good parent if something is “natural” or “organic,” even if it isn’t that healthy. (Kris)

Most kids, even young kids, know its good to be healthy, but they don’t really know how or why. (Samantha)

If a snack isn’t convenient to grab and go, it probably won’t get eaten very quickly- if at all. (Experience)

There’s a need for “heavy duty” snacks that can replace a meal but still be eaten quickly when you’re out and about. (Experience)

Kids often feel pressure to gain or lose weight, and will try to do this by eating lots of unhelthay snack food or not snacking at all. (Sammi)

Multitaskers want snacks packaged in such a way that they can be eaten without having to touch the snack, and thereby transferring germs. (Experience)

Problem Statements

Sammi, a camp counselor, needs a way to make snacks personalizable because kids want to stand out and be unique.

Kris, a mom, needs a way to prep healthy snacks quickly and easily because grabbing prepackaged snacks is so much easier than preparing healthy snacks.

Samantha, a kid, needs a way to learn more about the benefits of healthy eating because she knows she’s supposed to eat healthy food but doesn’t really know why.