Please tell us your ideas for getting children to eat more fruit - you could win £250 in supermarket vouchers

[HelenMumsnet]

Hello.

Do your children like fruit? Do they eat all sorts - or just the regulation daily banana?

ZESPRI Kiwifruit would love to hear your ideas for getting children to eat more fruit - whether your kids only just manage their five a day or are such fruit fiends, they could tell a kiwi from a kumquat at 40 paces.

Everyone who sends in an idea, tip or suggestion will be entered into a prize draw to win £250 in vouchers for a supermarket of their choice.*

Please note that your tips may be published on Mumsnet at a later date.

Thanks and good luck! MNHQ

*Participating supermarkets include Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Morrison, M&S and Waitrose

Picking our own fruit, the only time DS2 will eat fruit. Unless it is a fruit crumble.
Which is known as Gruffalo crumble in our house.

I don't have children but still have ideas - is that ok?

When I was a child I always wanted to try the weirdy fruits and my mum only bought bananas and apples and satsumas and boring fruits like that. So let them pick a strange fruit like physalis or pomegranete as a 'treat' (these are generally expensive, unfortunately, which is why mum woulnd't buy them).

Fruit smoothies are great for fussy eaters who don't like too much texture.

Fruit with ice-cream, pureed or just small cut

Fruit muffins, DD1 will only eat rasps in a muffin or smoothie.

Eat as much fruit as you like around them. DC3 will eat any fruit as she sees me eating it. Also we called them by their colours so she could ask for a strwawberry by asking for a red.

I have a total fruit refuser but he is just starting to eat it now. My tip for these blighters children is to grate/mash/puree small amounts of fruit into things you know they will eat, so they get a small amount of the flavour. Then build it up. I started off making banana or apple flapjacks with the fruit barely discernable at first, building up to big chunks later. It has worked.

Give them delicious fruit - easy at this time of year with strawberries, melons, raspberries in season.

Also try pick your own farms - they are more likely to eat the fruit they have chosen to pick themselves

Same principle but plant a small apple or plum tree in the garden, doesnt take up much space and they can pick and eat straight from the tree

Nothing majorly rocket science.

I always have lots of fruit I the house. I try to by seasonally, so there is always a variety.

Kids know that they can help themselves to fruit for a snack any time of day.

We make smoothies and fruity milkshakes at the weekend. Great treat for them, they love doing it and will eat fruit in a smoothie that they wouldn't normally eat (DS is quite fussy about fruit but will have anything in a smoothie).

Fruit for pudding after lunch and dinner. If they have other puds or treats (biscuits, cake etc), I only produce them after they've eaten their fruit.

Mashed or pureed fruit with yoghurt as a treat.

Encouraging them to experiment with weird and wonderful fruits. Ds has recently tried passion fruit and pomegranate after seeing them in a supermarket and asking me what they were.

Fruit 'pizza' on a pancake, cream instead of pure, fruit instead of toppings.

We also try a new fruit once a month.

I add fresh fruit to cakes and biscuits and desserts. When baking I reduce the sugar quantities in the recipes. The eyes tell him its a cake or biscuit and he seems to forget the fruit is in it! He ate rhubarb yesterday and the day before he ate cherries

I will say the snack swapper wheel from change for life campaign does work for us too. You can make your own wheel to snack swap so that all the swaps are just a healthy but more appealing to your particular child.

Oh yes, I forgot the sandwiches made with the obvious banana, but do try sliced apple in a sandwich, its quite nice.

You can have a chocolate fondue session, get as many different types of fruit as you can and dip them into melted chocolate. Yummmm (not too good for the teeth though so remember to brush afterwards)

my children will eat much more fruit if it is chopped up. If I chop it up, they eat it all, if not they sore of nibble round the middle and leave a lot. Don't know why though.
oh and they have found the strawberry patch in our garden - they love sneaking into there and stealing all my wild strawberries!

What Dwayne Dibbley said: Leave the fruitbowl out and within reach.

When DC are watching a film I give them bowlfuls of chopped up fruit and they eat them without thinking about it.

We try 'new fruit' now and again - it is pricey but a good habit to try new stuff. So we might just buy one dragon fruit and share between 4 of us just to see what it tastes like.

Let them try different ways of eating fruit. DC have always liked but not loved peeled kiwi or 'boiled egg style' kiwi. A friend mentioned that you can eat the skin and DS was so amazed he ate a punnet full in a week for the novelty factor!

You can eat the skin of a Kiwi? Really?

I told ds from a very young age that fruit is sweeties. Now he does not differentiate and will happily swap a bar of chocolate he has found (from my hidden stash) for a tangerine or apple. It's all the same to him!!

Threelitteducks is on the right track.
Don't give them sweets at all(cruel mummy i know) they can get all the sweetness from fruit and will generally like it more then some sticky sugar filled rubbish.
Once they start school and mix with other kids they will probably gravitate towards sweets though

We have a 'sweetie' tree, when they walk home from school we always stop and have some 'sweeties' (blackberrys) DS3 also thinks blueberries are sweets.

Last night I produced a huge bowl of strawberrys with a small bow of cream and they got through two punnets.

After school on hot days I turn up with a supermarket bag filled with ice cold chopped up water melon which goes in minutes.

Get very juicy mangos and tell them they can only eat them if they take their clothes off and eat them in the bath to stop mess (well it makes a lot more mess but at least it's confined to easy clean skin and the bath.

And the answer to 'can I have a snack' is always 'of course, anything you want from the fruit bowl.

We also do kiwi fruit in an egg cup, and cherry pip spitting competitions!

Introduce it REALLY early. My DS is a fruit fiend at the ripe old age of 8.5 months. I've given him a really wide variety from the start (6months), and let him try lots of tastes and textures. He also gets to play with it so squish bananas, pull blueberries out of a tub, chomp on whole peaches etc. So he knows it's fun and tastes good!

I second RiverofSleep, if fruit is left out in bowls, peeled and chopped into bite-sized chucks, it is surprising how much gets put away without them even realising!

• Set a good example - eat it yourself
• little & often - make it readily available e.g. a handful of berries with breakfast cereal; a handful of grapes with cheese for snack time
• remember that dried/tinned/frozen 'count' too. Sometimes it's not always easy to have fresh in the house everyday
• make it fun - kebabs, shapes etc
• leave bowls of cut fruit lying around for grazing (e.g if kids come home from school & are watching TV)
• get kids involved in growing/picking/cooking fruit

Funnily enough when I was at school doing Home Economics (about age 9) I remember being taught the food groups with 'people' made from the relevant foods. So fruit & veg was 'Hector the Body Protector' and had a head of an Orange and two bananas for legs . Stuck with me though that fruit & veg 'protects' me LOL

My two love 'green eggs'. Kiwi fruit in an egg cup, top sliced off eat with a spoon.

Also 'fruity faces' - banana mouth, strawberry eyes, orange nose etc.

Give them a portion of fruit (it's usually banana in our house) to eat while they wait for you to prepare breakfast. I think this works because:

1. they are so hungry it gets eaten without thinking.
2. they don't feel that it is instead of a 'nicer' option, which can sometimes happen with puddings.
3. It sounds like they are getting something extra - fruit as well as breakfast
4. You can drag out the preparation of breakfast a bit to give them more time to eat the fruit without nagging them to finish.