Smart Snack Recipes

Developing a Smart Snack Recipe for Young Children with Pacific Foods

The CHL Food Systems Extension and Outreach (FSEO) team partnered with the CHL Network Multistate Project (CHLN) on an initiative with the goal of increasing the number of nutritious, child-friendly snacks that showcase Pacific-grown food crops. The team adapted a recipe checklist that can be used to develop or evaluate healthy snack recipes in the “CHL Smart Snack Recipe Tool.”

About the CHL Smart Snack Recipe Tool

The CHL Smart Snack Recipe Tool was developed by CHLN to redefine snacks. It is used to evaluate existing recipes and as a guide to create new recipes to determine if they meet the USDA Smart Snack criteria and if they are suitable for children across the Pacific region. These guidelines also include a number of criteria to ensure that recipes are suitable for a variety of audiences who are hoping to provide children with healthy snack options that also highlight locally grown or produced ingredients. These guidelines list nutrition standards for recipes and foods that have nutrition facts labels or nutrition composition calculated from a nutrient database (i.e., Pacific Food Tracker). It lists a number of recommended best practices for reviewing and developing high quality recipes. These best practices help to ensure that recipes are reproducible, can be utilized by a variety of audiences, and are comprehensible.

Resources

• Presentation: Introducing the CHL Snack Initiative
• PDF: CHL Smart Snack Recipe Tool
• About CHLN

Community Partnerships

FSEO worked with community partners and students from 3 groups: undergraduate, 4H, and high school. Materials and resources were developed for each group to assist in either developing or evaluating healthy snack recipes for young children across the Pacific. Learn more about each group below!

Undergraduate: University of Hawai’i Manoa | FSHN 381 Experimental Foods
Undergraduate: University of Hawai’i Manoa | FSHN 181  Introduction to Food Preparation