Noodad Product Test-drive: The Snack Sack

Do you ever find yourself marveling at the amount of trash you generate these days? Between the Diaper Decor bags stuffed with lethal hand-grenades and handfuls of dryer lint from baby clothes, bedding and towels (one day, I know I’ll open the dryer and all that will be left is the lint in the lint trap!), our single trash barrel that served us well before is overflowing by trash day. So is our recycling bin. For people so small, babies and kids generate an amazing amount of incremental trash.

It’s not a surprise that feeding and eating are responsible for a significant proportion of our trash in general but baby’s too. Without any effort, you can easily blow through roll of Saran Wrap or a box of Ziplock Snack Size baggies.

When it comes to keeping snacks contained when out of the house, you do have reusable options though…the ever popular Snack Trap and now The Snack Sack. The Snack Sack is a carabiner-toting cloth elasticized-drawstring bag
which holds a stainless steel bowl.

A product of the cottage industry of smart, enterprising stay-at-home
parents, The Snack Sack is a mom’s personal crusade to shrink her
family’s own “carbon footprint” while making it easier for little hands
to feed themselves Cheerios and the like.

Simple in design and eco-chic
in the kind of way that should make it the “must-have” status symbol
for your neighbor to clip to their Bugaboo (sorry, can’t miss an
opportunity to tease our “Bug” pushing friends), snacks sit in the bowl
and are
secured within the sack…easy-peasy.

What’s innovative about The Snack Sack is not so much the design (although it is unique in the marketplace) as it is the premise that kids can learn to operate a snack-delivery system to feed themselves. After only a few demonstrations, a kid aged 18 months + should be able to pull the tie to open the bag and negotiate the elasticized opening. And the carabiner makes for a great handle for little hands.

Overall, we like The Snack Sack for its eco-consciousness, the fact that it separates our kids’ food from plastics (can’t be a bad thing) and that testers seemed to like to use it. At $10.95-$13.95 [special offer for Noodad readers, see below] depending on which fashionable fabric you choose, The Snack Sack will pay for itself in no time flat. All that said, Noodads should be aware of two issues we discovered through testing.

First, the sack is just cloth (which makes it washable) and therefore, effectively limits its use to carrying “dryish” foods. We’re not product designers at Noodad.com however, we wonder if the interior could be coated with some kind of moisture-blocking treatment that would inhibit “seepage” from the inside out…say from orange slices or blueberries. Maybe that would introduce some kind of potentially nasty chemical into the equation thereby defeating the eco and safety benefits of The Snack Sack…we’re not chemists either.

The second concern is purely a function of the user and not the product…the combination of the metal bowl inside a cloth sack attached to a carabiner results in a weapon akin to a medieval mace. It took one of the product testers all of 3 minutes to discover that he could use The Snack Sack to make a great thumping noise against any hard surface. Noodad Test Lab’s insurance underwriter should be glad that the tester did not have enough time with the product to discover that the other tester’s head would make a similar sound to the kitchen cabinet!

For those looking for another tool in their snack-administering arsenal, who are eco-conscious in practice and not just beliefs or who simply appreciate a smart idea, The Snack Sack represents a good buy.

Noodad Test Rating: 4 noos (out of a possible 5)

The Offer: Libby Tweet, Owner of The Snack Sack has extended this offer to Noodad.com readers. Order your Snack Sacks via email (shop the site but email your order to info@thesnacksack.com) and she’ll discount 10% from the purchase total.