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Freedom Food XO Crunch | Chewsday Review

Freedom Foods do some great products for people with allergies, providing gluten and nut free options of commonly enjoyed breakfast cereals. But are they any healthier? Let’s see… Today’s Chewsday Review features Freedom Foods XO crunch.

Ingredients

Positives

Low fat and saturated fat content, well within healthy guidelines.
High fibre content of 3g per serve. This is significantly more than other cocoa style cereals (coco pops- 0.5g/serve). One 35g serve would meet about 21% of a toddler’s fibre requirements and 16% of an older child’s requirements.
Significantly lower sodium (salt) content than lots of breakfast cereals at only 70mg/100g (coco pops is a high salt food at 425mg/100g).

Negatives

High sugar content of 22.2g/100g (coco pops has 36.5g/100g). Even though it’s lower than cocoa pops, it exceeds healthy guidelines and means that almost a quarter of this product comes from sugar. It’s also all added sugar (you can see cane sugar in the ingredient list as the ingredient in the second highest concentration by weight). A serve of this (which is only a very small amount anyway) would give you almost 2 tsp of added sugar. That’s too much for a daily cereal.
There’s no added iron in this cereal, which is actually one of the positives of cocoa pops (who knew?!) and why I recommend cereals like Weet-Bix. Iron is a tricky nutrient for lots of kids to get enough of, so fortified cereals do help.

Marketing

“Source of fibre.” True.
“Fun in a bowl- shapes make brekkie a whole lot more fun” Perhaps, but l’d prefer my fun without so much added sugar!
“No nasties.” Ugh I hate this term. Nasties aren’t actually a thing. Also, most products now are free of artificial colours, flavours and preservatives so it’s not like it’s different to other cereals. But that’s marketing for you!

Alternatives