Gift Guide: 16 Artisan Snacks for the Healthy Eater
These are our tasty choices for the healthy snacker, and they make great gifts. Snacking is part of life in this busy world. Fortunately you can happily snack without adding tons of undesired calories, preservatives, or other dietary issues into your mouth.
THINAddictives Double Dark Chocolate Almond
THINAddictives are truly that — addictive. Once you starting munching on them and their dark chocolate accents, you’ll want to keep going. Fortunately these award winning thins are only 70 calories.
Frontera Tortilla Chips with Sea Salt
For those of us who sometimes like a chip but often want to avoid potatoes, these heirloom corn tortilla chips flavored with sea salt by Celebrity Chef Rick Bayless (“Mexico: One Plate at a Time”, public television) are the perfect choice.
Maxine’s Heavenly Cookies, Chocolate Chip
If you’re a cooking lover, Maxine’s award winning chocolate chip is a healthy alternative to cookies that use gluten, soy, and white sugar. She avoids them all, and it still tastes yummy.
Wai Lana Cassava Pops, Luau BBQ Flavor
Wai Lana is known for its popular and long-running yoga and meditation television series, but the brand has branched out into delicious food and snack options, such as these gluten free and vegan puffed chips made with cassava instead of potatoes. Not to mention, they are Hawaiian Luau BBQ flavor.
Bloom 100% Raw Honey, Orange Blossom
This orange blossom honey won big in the TasteTV Honey Awards, and we saw it sell out at recent foodie events. Apparently people love the taste as much as we do. Made in California, 100% raw with tons of flavor and a great texture.
Snapea Crisps
Made from roasted green peas, this tasty choice fulfills two key ingredients in snacking: great flavors, great crunch. It’s also low sodium, which is also great if you are watching your salt intake.
Solkiki Chocolate
Solkiki bean-to-bar chocolates have won numerous awards from the International Chocolate Salon, especially for their vegan creations such as the Solkiki Tahitian Nougat bar. The Marañón 60% Salted Dark Milk with coconut bar was a judge’s favorite.
Mtn Honey Pure Wildflower Honey
Any premium honey you can pour from a squeeze bottle is a plus, and award-winning Mtn Honey brings to the table mouth-watering healthy sweetness collected by their bees from a variety of wildflowers such as blackberry, basswood, black locust, maple, and wild blueberries.
Foods Alive Coconut Curry Power Crackers
Award winning Power Crackers by Foods Alive come in a range of tantalizing adult snack flavors like Chocolate Macaroon, Lemon Chia Crunch, and Coconut Curry. The crackers are made with a mixture of almonds, walnuts, flax seed, sunflower seed and Reishi mushroom powder. Power Crackers are organic, non-GMO, vegan, gluten free and even Kosher.
Granny Pearl’s Bite Size Cookies
Sometimes size is everything, especially if you are watching your portions when eating. According to Project Nosh, “Bite size desserts continue to be a hot trend in packaged products and on restaurant menus as healthier lifestyles nudge consumers to indulge in smaller, portion-controlled treats.”
That’s one reason why Granny Pearl’s Bite Size Cookies are a fun choice. That, and the fact they come in a box shaped like a little house. They come in flavors like snickerdoodle, chocolate chip, pecan chocolate chip, peanut butter, pecan sandies, and lemon tea cookies.
Wai Lana Fruit and Nut Bar
Wai Lana’s award-winning line of fruit and nut bars are both juicy and energizing. They come in a broad selection of flavors, including macadamia, apricot cashew, cherry pomegranate, nana banana, and cranberry almond.
They are also naturally sweet, have no added sugars or artificial additives, and are gluten-free, wheat-free, vegan, and non-GMO.
Home-Free Cookies
Homefree mini-cookies are delicious snacks that also happen to be healthy. They have won numerous awards in the Healthy Gourmet Snack Awards presented by Taste TV, including Four stars for “Healthiness“, and they deserve them.
What makes them healthier than your normal cookies are that they are gluten-free, non-GMO, egg free, dairy free, not free, peanut free, no soy, no rice, vegan, kosher, and whole-grain. In addition, as far as we can tell the mini-cookie size allows for some measure of portion control.
Muuna Cottage Cheese
Skip the yogurt and try Muuna Cottage Cheese instead. Flavors include Strawberry, Peach, Blueberry, Mango, and Pineapple. They can be eaten straight or used in recipes such as cheesecake or cornbread, and the plain version can be used in recipes like lasagna. On the health side, Muuna’s Lowfat Plain Cottage Cheese has only 120 calories, 4g sugar, and 19g protein per 5.3oz container. It also contains no artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners.
Nature’s Bakery Pomegranate Fig Bar
If you love fig bars but are tired of the kinds that are filled with artificial ingredients and flavors, your prayers have been answered with Nature’s Bakery Pomegranate Fig Bar. They are gluten-free, high fructose corn syrup free, artificial flavors free, colors free, preservatives free, and soy free
Free the fig!
Just Mayo
This is more about when you are preparing a snack, such as a sandwich. San Francisco-based Just Mayo “mayonaise” is vegan and GMO-free. And tasty. Very tasty.
Mori-nu Tofu
Tofu is a very healthy ingredient, and you can eat it raw, sauteed, fried, baked, or covered with sauce. What we like about Mori-nu Tofu is that it also comes packaged in a perfectly sealed box that does not require refrigeration. This means it lasts longer than regular tofu in your refrigerator, and it available to use just when you need it.
