Yummy Ideas to Get Preschooler to Eat Berries

Frozen blue berries thats the only way my dd would eat them. Costco has the best flash frozen wild berries.

This is probably not new but I have been putting my blueberries in the freezer. Kids love them, I love them!

Mix the blueberries with yogurt, like a honey greek yogurt or something like that. That will soften the 'tart' taste. I would wait and see how that goes before trying raspberries, as they are more tart and the texture (the seeds) can be off-putting for some.

For the strawberries, make sure you rub them gently but sufficiently under softly running water to remove as many of the seeds as you can. I can't stand to eat a strawberry that still has ALL the seeds on it. But a few seconds rubbing it under running water removes a HUGE amount of them... so that you don't notice them.

If you are already doing that, then (gasp!) try putting a squirt of reddi-whip on a plate with them. My daughter is one of the finickiest eaters... she is 11 and sometimes I think she is getting MORE finicky instead of less. But when she was 3, she would ask for strawberries for her dessert and eat every bite---so long as she had a bit of whipped cream to dip them in. Otherwise, forget it.

I guess I am lucky, my kids have not met any fruit that they don't like. I mix fruit in yogurt-vanilla. I make pospicles, with yogurt, water and pureed fruit.

You can make fun designs..

Good Luck

Smoothies!! My son does love berries, but we make smoothies often. I also freeze the smoothies in popsicle forms. He loves the berry banana combination in the smoothie. We don't add milk, just some plain greek yogurt. I even put spinach, kale, and other greens in the smoothies. You can google for tons of recipes.

Smoothies! Fruit juice (we do half OJ, half apple) plain yogurt, banana, berries and ice (or no ice if you use frozen berries.)

Black Raspberries or black berries are sweeter then the red.

You could put a little sugar on them and use them as ice cream topping or as a topping on pound cake or angel food cake. Once he learns to like them he may also like them on cereal for breakfast, they are yummy on oatmeal. I like to add a handful or two of frozen berries to my bowl of hot oatmeal, then top with milk. The oatmeal defrosts the berries and the berries cool off the oatmeal.

get a juicer and juice them and freeze them into ice pops. Freeze the berries whole. Take the compote left over from the juice and bake him mini muffins and frost them. Bake them into breads. That is the best way to hide fruit and veggies kids won't eat. Stick them in the blender and make a smoothie.....banana and strawberry combo with yougurt. ....slice them up and put them in pancakes. I would not advise whole fresh blackberries & raspberries due to the seeds. Blend those or juice them. Don't want to give him a bad first experience with those.

I have to laugh because I almost had a post MY KIDS EAT TOO MANY BERRIES. I love their health benefits. I know it's well worth it, and better than cancer bills later on. They won't stop eating them. Each will eat a container a day easily (we get organic). So that could be (with the 4 kids eating them) $20 a day on raspberries! I do keep buying. Berries are little miracles for health.

We get frozen too (organic but it's cheaper). Raspberries don't hold up too well frozen, but peaches do...I know that's not a berry.
I just started putting berries out at meals or between them. I have to watch because if they eat too many then they get an upset tummy, lol. But berries are certainly our biggest food expense and also, I feel, a wise investment in the future. I can't wait until summer, though! Here in the midwest we have to get everything from California or South America. Nothing too local yet.

smoothies!! You can't really hide the raspberry seeds, but blueberries are quite perfect for smoothies. I've been making them daily: pineapple, strawberries, banana, blueberries, ice, water in my NutriBullet, and they are great!

You could sneak them into smoothies. Sprinkle just the tiniest amount of sugar onto them, maybe, for the first couple of times, to get him used to the flavor. For a high maintenance treat, you could blend them with some plain greek yogurt and a bit of OJ (which will sweeten the whole thing) and freeze them in ice-pop molds in the freezer (if seeds are an issue, strain the mixture before freezing).

Of course, it would help if the berries were sweet to begin with. For the last couple of months, we've had the sweetest, most delicious blueberries that we can't get enough of. But the strawberries have been really tart.

I got my niece to try a blueberry by putting one inside a raspberry (it looked so cute and I wouldn't let her copy me unless she promised to eat them afterwards "sorry, sweetie, you can't play with the berries unless you're going to eat them"). So she popped them in her mouth and stated "Well, mommy, I like blueberries now, too."

Mix them with yogurt and granola.

Add to pancakes - on top or add them to the batter while cooking

I used to love this when I was a kid: add a little milk to the berries and sprinkle with a bit of sugar if they're tart. Mash them if it helps with texture.

Fruit compote. You should be able to reduce the sugar without ill effect. Use it to top pancakes, waffles, yogurt. Mix it with yogurt and dip toast in it.

ETA - love the frozen idea. Sometimes that's the only way to get my kids to eat peas, especially in the summer!

There's something about frozen blueberries that my kids love! My son doesn't really eat blueberries (unlike my daughter who could eat a pint in one sitting) but he will eat them frozen.

Also, my kids really like freeze dried fruits. They are kind of expensive but they are just fruit and nothing else. They are crunchy and different and very easy to take with you. Plus when it's winter and nothing is in season, I like this option as well. Target, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods all sell them in bags. They are about the same price in each place.

Muffins. He'll love helping you make them, and love eating them,

It could also be the seeds. That's a common complaint against berries. Try fresh blueberries first and see if he likes them. If he doesn't, in addition to smoothies, you could put them in muffins or give him a little whipped cream or sweetened yogurt and let him dip them.

A friend of mine just shared this with me the other day.,. You can use strawberries, raspberries, any larger or hollow berry and put a single chocolate chip inside (it can be any type of chip, really or even something else if you use your imagination. A different friend of mine who I babysat for would put flavored cream cheese in/on the berries or on the side to dip (sometimes she'd do flavored yogurt, too.

Just an idea! Good luck!

Smoothies are a great idea. You can also roast the fruit to concentrate their sweetness and then throw the berries in something (yogurt, cereal). Or you could roast/dehydrate them and throw them in cereal.

My girls love berries in the summer when they are sweet. They'll eat bushels. They barely touch them in the winter though.

I'm laughing at Jenny's post. Jenny, we must have the same kind of kids. My younger son would eat 10 bucks worth of apples every other day if I bought enough. And yes, almost any fruit gets eaten within a few days in my house. Once in a while the bananas get left out, but everything else I buy, my son will snarf up.

I love the ideas here on this thread. I might try them just to space out him eating the fruit so fast. (Of course, that means I have to hide the fruit until I fix it.)

Dawn

If you don't want to add sugar to the berries try using Stevia. It's made from a plant, is natural, and has not calories. It is not artificial tho some insist that it is. It's made from the Stevia plant just as sugar is made from sugar cane or sugar beets. But unlike sugar Stevia has no calories.

I use the liquid Stevia that comes in a small eye dropper bottle as well as granulated sugar that comes in a small plastic bottle, the size of a large pill bottle. It's very concentrated so that it takes just a few drops or the tip of a teaspoon to sweeten a single serving.