Why are rice cakes not suitable until 7 months?

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DD is not quite 6 months and we started weaning her fairly early about a month ago. She's doing well and seems to enjoy her food but I can tell that she'd be more into BLW and finger foods than purees, which I've mainly been doing so far cos she's still quite young.

In the past few days I've been giving her a few more finger foods like melon and pear fingers and cucumber rings which she enjoys. I can't give bread or egg yet as she's not 6 months yet, so I thought I'd get her some of those mini rice cakes as DS enjoyed them when I was weaning him. But on the pack it says suitable from 7 months +. I can't work out why they're not suitable for younger babies than 7 months? Does anyone know?

They are gluten free, I can't see anything in them that would make them unsuitable for her. Is it because finger foods are more of a choking hazard? Am I missing something? Do you think I'd be ok to give it to her at almost 6 months? I would obviously be sitting right next to her when she's eating.

I am sure she will be fine with them so I'd give her one and see how she gets on

I think the ages are more based on traditional puree then lumps then finger food type weaning. We've certainly given (normal, adult, salt-free) rice cakes since we started weaning at 5-6 months.

Yes, I believe it's the choking hazard.

The ages on the packs are part of the advertising of the baby food companies - they advertising the puree'd stuff from 4 months etc. Rather than any actual risk, it's to keep you buying their "age" stuff rather than moving on to normal food which is much cheaper - or of course you can just only ever do normal food.

Are they the flavoured ones? Dd reacted a couple of times to the savoury snacks that were sold as a bit 'old' for her. I think they had quite condensed carrot/onion flavours added to them and she came up in a bit of a rash. Fine now she's older on most things though

It's because they're a finger food and they don't want to be sued for you giving them to a 4 month old in a baby bouncer who then chokes on it.

Oh, and what Fred said - they like to keep their idea of these "stages" so that you hang on to the idea that you can only give mush until they're a certain age and then move slowly onto lumps etc. When really you can just give them normal adult food (with salt etc taken into account) from the time they can sit up.