Ideas
Nut-free school lunches: a week to start from
A nut-free school lunch is a main, a side, a fruit and a sweet with no peanuts or tree nuts in any of them. The easiest way to keep to it all week is to plan the five boxes on the weekend from foods you have already checked, so nothing gets decided at 7am with a packet in your hand.
This page is about keeping a school's nut-free rule. If your own kid has an allergy, their doctor's plan comes first, and nothing here replaces it.
A week to start from
- Monday: turkey and cheese roll-ups, crackers, apple slices, a chocolate chip cookie from a nut-free bakery line
- Tuesday: pasta salad with cheese and cucumber, pretzels, grapes, a yogurt tube
- Wednesday: a bean and cheese quesadilla, eaten cold, tortilla chips, a clementine, a mini muffin
- Thursday: a ham and cheese sandwich, carrot sticks, strawberries, a cookie
- Friday: hard-boiled egg, cheese cubes and crackers, apple slices, a rice crispy square
Every food here is one to check against its label and your school's letter.
Each box pairs something soft with something that crunches, and each has a main that carries protein on its own, which is where a box usually goes wrong once peanut butter is off the table.
Where nuts tend to turn up
The main is rarely the problem. The sweet and the snack are. Granola bars, cookies, bakery muffins, trail mixes and some chocolate carry nuts or a "may contain" line far more often than a sandwich does. Those are the ones to read first.
Read the label on every packaged food, every time, even one you have bought for years. Recipes change, and a new "made in a facility" line is easy to miss on a box that looks the same.
What to swap for peanut butter
This is the question behind most nut-free searches, because peanut butter was doing a lot of work: it was the protein, it kept without an ice pack, and the kid liked it.
- Sunflower seed butter is the usual swap. Check the school's letter first: some nut-free schools also ask families not to send it, because staff cannot tell it from peanut butter at a glance, and a school that is seed-free rules it out altogether.
- Cream cheese or hummus on a tortilla or a bagel. Hummus is usually made with tahini, which is sesame: that is a sesame question, not a nut one. Check the label for pine nuts.
- Deli meat and cheese, rolled or on crackers, if your school has somewhere cold or you pack an ice pack.
- Last night's dinner, cold: pasta, rice, a quesadilla, chicken, if you have checked everything that went into it.
When the letter says more than nuts
September letters often add a second rule: seed-free, no sesame, no chocolate, nothing that needs a microwave. Plan against all of them at once, not one at a time, or you will throw out the week you just built. Write the rules at the top of the list before you choose a single food.
If you have two kids at two schools, you have two sets of rules. A food that is fine in one box can be out in the other. Plan the boxes together and swap only the foods that one school does not allow; the shopping list stays shorter that way.
Where Lunch Sorted fits
We built Lunch Sorted because our own lunches kept coming home. In a lunchbox's settings, Nuts under "Keep out of" is already on when you start; add Seeds & sesame beside it if the letter says seed-free, and switch on No chocolate or candy under School rules if it says that; Cold lunches only is already on unless you told it there's a microwave. The planner then keeps your school's rules every time it plans the week. A food that breaks a rule is not deleted: it stays on your list, marked with the rule, so you can see why it stopped appearing. Each lunchbox keeps its own rules, so two schools are two boxes (a second lunchbox is part of the Household plan, on for your first three weeks). The rule works from what we know about each food; the label is still yours to read.
The planner is free to try on the home page. The iPhone app is coming, and the waitlist there is how you hear when it's out.