Make Your Own Organic Flavored Baby Yogurt

Just to be clear, this is not a make your own yogurt from scratch recipe. That is way, WAY above my capabilities. This is just simple instructions on how to mix up some tasty and healthy baby yogurt with less added sugar. We are big users of Stonyfield yogurts in our house. My first 3 children started out on YoBaby Yogurt at about 18 months old and have since graduated to YoKids. However this time around with my youngest, I decided to take a different approach. While I like the YoBaby yogurts a lot, there are two issues I have: 1. There is a considerable amount of added sugar and 2. the single serve packs just seem so wasteful to me.

If you take a look at the YoBaby Blueberry yogurt you will see that 4oz (113g) single serve container has 12g of sugar and the 2nd ingredient is organic sugar.  However, if you look at Stonyfield's Plain Whole Milk yogurt, one serving of 8oz (227g) has 12g of sugar. So that means the equivalent baby serving would have only 6g. More importantly, there is no added sugar. In fact there are only three ingredients: cultured pasteurized organic whole milk, pectin and vitamin D3.

So one day I had a moment of sheer brilliance. Well, I like to think it is brilliant anyway. Instead of buying the sugar infused single serve containers of baby yogurt, I would take plain yogurt and baby food purees to make my own. As an added bonus, I try to pick a baby food that has a blend of fruits and vegetables since my 16 month old has already started his veggie boycotting. Above I have a 3.5oz pouch of Happy Baby Spinach, Mango & Pear and a 32oz container of Stonyfield Plain Whole Milk Yogurt. (Both are organic, by the way).  The ratio of yogurt to baby food will depend on you and your baby and may take some trial and error.  more veggies in.

So I used about half the pouch and 3 tablespoons of the yogurt. The baby food pouch has 10g of sugars (none added) so that gives me 5g in my mixture. One tablespoon is equivalent to 0.5oz so my yogurt portion has about 4.5g of sugars. That brings my total sugars to 9.5g which is 2.5g less than the YoBaby plus none of it is added sugar. And I get some vegetables into my baby boy.

This is another combination I did with a Happy Tots pouch. Since the pouch is bigger I can get about 3 servings out of it. Both of these have a been a huge hit with my little guy. Even though the first combo with the spinach might not look so attractive, he loves it! And believe me there is no other way I could get him to eat spinach.

Lastly in addition to cutting out the added sugars, I love that their is less packaging and waste with this method. Since I am always home when I give the baby yogurt, I don't need the single serves containers. I would need at least three 4-packs to equal what I get out of the one 32oz container. So instead of having 12 small containers in the recycle bin there is only one large one. I like that much better.

Organic Baby Yogurt Recipe

These are some measurements to start off with. Adjust to your baby's tastes and preferences.
3-4 Tbsp organic plain whole milk yogurt
3-4 Tbsp organic fruit and/or veggie baby food puree.

Mix and serve!