As a homeschooling mom, I am grateful I don’t have to pack lunches for my kids every day. However, I do need to pack lunches for field trips and such at least once a week. So, school mamas, I feel your pain! In this post, I will share my favorite paleo kids lunch ideas.

Criteria For Making Paleo Kids Lunches

When I did some research to write this blog post, I found many different articles online. However, I found that most of the time, I couldn’t use the ideas because they included ingredients I wanted to avoid, or they didn’t have all my criteria for happy kids and happy moms.

Paleo Kids Lunches Without

Even though the Paleo Diet allows nuts, these paleo lunch ideas are nut-free because I realize most schools prevent you from packing anything with nuts. So, these Paleo school lunches don’t include:

• Nuts
• Dairy
• Grains
• Peanuts (I included hummus which is made from legumes, but you could omit legumes all together)

Kids Lunches for Happy Kids and Happy Mom

Besides the ingredients I wanted to avoid, I had some criteria to make sure both kids and moms were pleased with these lunch ideas:

• Nutrient-dense
• Easy to make
• Similar foods to what other kids would eat in school
• Diversity of foods
• Easy to adapt to your child’s preferences
• Easy to pack
• Keep your children full for many hours

Now that you know what to expect with these Paleo school lunch ideas, let’s get to it!

How I Pack Paleo Kids Lunches

Once you have the right ingredients on hand, packing kids’ lunches becomes a breeze. You can then grab whatever is easiest and put it in your cute little lunchboxes.

Kids Lunch-Friendly Produce

• Strawberries
• Grapes
• Kiwi
• Grape tomatoes
• Clementines
• Apples
• Bananas
• Melons
• Cucumber
• Celery
• Carrots
• Pineapple

Store-bought Products

• Veggie Crisps or Cauliflower chips like this brand
• Assorted Pates from Costco and the grocery store
• Healthier chips or sweet potato chips like these
• Chicken breast strips
• Cold cuts
• Salami
• Dried fruit
• Gluten-free sourdough bread

Homemade Items

• Seed crackers like these Endurance Crackers
• Paleo Naan Bread (one of my all-time favorites!)
• Pancakes (use a Paleo mix) or check out this post for more recipe ideas
• Paleo Meatballs
• Hard-boiled eggs
• Hummus

A Word About Lunch Boxes

For this post, I decided to try out three different lunchboxes I could buy on Amazon. Paleo kids’ lunches are quicker to pack and prepare when you have proper lunch boxes. Since we usually go out as a family and I have no children in school, I would pack similar food items and bring plates to share among the children. They liked seeing me prepare all these little boxes and I have to admit, it was a treat! I feel that these boxes would be a necessity for children in school. They make packing a variety of food so much easier!

What Brand of Lunch Box?

The two most common boxes promoted online are PlanetBox and Lunchbots. PlanetBox is not available on Amazon.ca, so I tried different ones instead. Here are the lunchboxes I tried:

• LunchBots Medium Trio II Snack Container (Click here for Canada and here for the USA): The advantage the LunchBots is all the different formats available. You can pick the snack container like I did and have the decent side compartments for your choices of foods. You can pick containers that have two compartments, or five! You can select a container that has a compartment sized for a sandwich and two snack compartments. These lunchboxes are incredibly versatile!
• Health and Yoga Double Decker Container (Click here for Canada and here for the USA): This lunchbox is a stacked three compartments container. The compartments are big so that it would work perfectly for a teen or a tween. It was my 13-year-old daughter’s favorite!
• Lunch Bento Box Stainless Steel Square Food Storage Container (click here for Canada and here for the USA): This box is my least favorite although it is perfectly decent. I didn’t like it as much as the other two because the two compartments were not space effective and the box didn’t look as cute. However, some customers might appreciate that it is leakproof.

Watch Me Pack These Paleo Kids Lunches

In this video, you see the process, and I show you how I pack 10 Paleo kids lunches in under 15 minutes. It’s not a science; you can mix and match everything any way you want! It’s that simple!