Sardo Li'l Oliver Olive Snack Packs: Product Review

Olive a healthy snack for the kids, but sometimes convincing them to eat it is a challenge. Sorry, bad joke, but olive a good pun!

As I have ranted on about many times before, we live in a toxic food environment which encourages overconsumption of highly processed, low nutrition convenience foods...especially for kids! Most food products marketed to children is fluorescent hued nutritionally void garbage. But the marketing works. When I take the girls grocery shopping, it sounds something like this,

"Mommy can we get ____ ?"
"No"
"Mommy can we get ____ ?"
"No"
"Mommy can we get ____ ?"
"No"
"But this one is 'made with whole grains."
"No"
"What about this one? Its only got 7 grams a sugar per serving."
"No."

Believe me, we are not in the produce aisle! Its usually the aisle with crackers, cookies or snack foods. Or even the dairy aisle, because, of course, now you can get sugar sweetened yogurt with cookie crumbles or sprinkles on top!

Sigh.

Studies have shown that kids are highly influenced by packaging, no matter what the content. Even fruits and veggies are more appealing to them if they have a cartoon character on the label.
For this reason, I was very excited when Sardo offered samples of its new kid packs of olives. Perfect for a lunch box, these snack sized containers feature a cute mascot, Li'l Oliver and contain stickers.

Here's the nutritional info per pack:

Know what I like? Zero grams of sugar!!

Now, my kids - despite my love of exotic cuisine - are not very adventurous, so I didn't really have high hopes they'd like olives, but I definitely wanted to try. They were eager to sample the goods when they arrived (black and green varieties) and loved the stickers, but didn't love the olives. Grrrrrrrrr! I once dumped a guy I was dating in university because he didn't like olives. How can you not like olives??

I still think its a fantastic healthy snack idea so I gave them to my sister-in-law because my niece and nephew love olives. So don't let my failed experience dissuade you, you never know what your kids will like and maybe Li'l Oliver might just tip the scales in your favour! As for me, I will keep trying since, as they say, you need to let your kids try a new food at least 10 times before you give up since familiarity often breeds liking. Oh yeah, don't you worry, one day these girls will be olive eaters!

Disclosure: I was sent these products compliments of the company, but all opinions on this blog are my own.

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