Average Price: $8 for 2
Availability: Widely available online and off.
Product Rating:
Product Link: Munchkin Fresh Food Feeder

The Munchkin Fresh Food Feeder is one of a number of mesh feeder bags on the market, each of which has its own unique twist on the idea. Basically, it’s a strong cloth mesh bag on a plastic frame with a handle. You put the food into the bag, and give it to the baby to chew on. As the baby chews on it, the food passes through the mesh as what is basically “strained” food. No pureeing or straining necessary, and the baby gets to feed himself without worry of choking incidents, and without the baby shoving a spoon into places where a spoon best not go.

In short, it’s a great idea with no immediately obvious shortcomings. My son’s only complaint is that it doesn’t fit nearly enough food- two small chunks of frozen banana, or a few small cubes of water or EBM.

You’ll soon realize what I did, though. There are two major shortcomings with this product.

1- It’s virually impossible to get all of the remaining food out of the fresh food feeder. If you scrub it with the mesih sack turned right-side-out, you can’t get all of the food out because all food has fibers. Those fibers stick to the inside of the mesh and need to be scrubbed out. The manufacturer suggests soaking it in hot water and using a soft-bristled brush, which definitely helps., but you still can’t count on getting all of the food out. It sticks to the seams of the bag and to the holes in the bag. If you turn the bag inside out, you can clean it a little bit better, but the way the bag attaches to the plastic frame means that when it’s inside out, there’s a good 1/5th of the bag that you can’t access to clean at all. If the food has dried on, it just makes it even harder.

2- The size of the opening that the food must pass through to get into the bag is VERY small. Rather than cutting bananas into rounds and freezing them, you have to cut the rounds in half in order for them to get through the opening. Standard sized icecubes will not pass through the opening, you’ll have to use gum-drop sized trays… Which opens a whole other can of worms because those smaller cubes melt faster and therefore are less useful.. Also, what sized trays do we all freeze our homemade baby food in? The larger trays that provide serving-sized frozen portions. Good luck getting cubes from those trays through the tiny opening.

Those downsides aside, the mesh feeding bag is a great idea, and there are certain elements to the Munchkin implementation that I like- the ring around the bag, and the handle are textured so that the baby can chew on them as well as on the bag, providing a teething surface even after the food in the bag is gone. The handle is the perfect size and texture for my 6 month old son to grab onto, and he loves to shake it around after all the food is gone. Also, the closing mechanism means that one doesn’t have to worry about properly threading a screw-closure. It snaps open and snaps closed easily but requires enough force to open that you don’t have to worry about the infant opening it and choking on the contents. The fact that the mesh bag is removable also adds some additional safety to the equation, even though it makes it far more frustrating to clean.

My son has two teeth that are partially erupted, which made me slightly concerned that he could tear through the mesh and choke on the contents. So I did a few tests. I pulled on the mesh with all the force my hands could muster- nothing. Then I sunk my teeth into the mesh and tried to bite it open/pull it to rip it. My adult-sized hands and teeth could do no damage to the mesh or to the opening, something very reassuring about a product that is designed to prevent children from choking.

I have yet to use the competing products, so I don’t know how the positive features of the Munchkin Fresh Food Feeder stack up against the pros and cons of the alternatives… But I do know that when the imminent need to purchase a new feeder sack comes up… And imminent it is, seeing how hard the blasted thing is to clean… I will be investigating the competition and will post my findings here.

A final note of caution… The food in the feeders still presents hazard to the clothes that the baby is wearing. Be prepared to clean the baby, the stroller, the clothes, the high chair, or any play equiptment off after the baby’s used the fresh food feeder. You have been warned.