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MasterFoods Tomato Sauce With Hidden Veg | Chewsday Review

If your child regularly likes to drown their food in tomato sauce, check out today’s Chewsday Review for all of the saucy details. I wonder if this is the “healthy tomato sauce” that they give to Bluey and Bingo 🙄

Ingredients

Positives

Negatives

At 16.2g per 100g, the sugar content of this sauce is above our target. But, this is actually lower than many other tomato sauces, with sugar content ranging from around 15g to 28g per 100g.
Sodium content of 600mg per 100g is also above guidelines, but again, at the lower end of the market range of around 300mg to 1350mg per 100g. This works out to 120mg of sodium per tablespoon of sauce, or around 15% of a toddler’s daily salt allowance.
This sauce isn’t cheap at $4.90 per bottle, with a higher price tag than regular and reduced salt and sugar MasterFoods Tomato Sauce ($3.80).

Marketing

‘5 serves of veg in every bottle’. This is theoretically possible given that a ‘serve’ of veg is 75g, but no one is having a bottle of sauce for dinner (although I can think of lots of kids who might see that as a challenge!). I’m always dubious about products that claim to help you ‘sneak’ vegetables in, especially when we’re talking about sauce quantities. It also doesn’t help kids build confidence to ever like vegetables. I’d much prefer to see real veg served for exposure with a side of tomato sauce!
‘Feel good knowing your kids will eat a dinner that is better for them’. Parent guilt 101. But also, better than what dinner?!
‘25% less sugar and salt than our regular tomato sauce’. Correct. In fact, it has a very similar sugar and salt content to the MasterFoods Reduced Salt & Sugar Tomato Sauce, but with a higher price tag for those ‘hidden veg’.

Alternatives

This sauce has less sodium and sugar compared to others on the market, which is great, but I wouldn’t choose it just for the vegetable content.
MasterFoods Reduced Salt & Sugar Tomato Sauce or Aldi Colway Reduced Salt & Sugar Tomato Sauce are cheaper options with similar sodium and sugar levels.
It’s also totally fine to just choose the tomato sauce that your family likes to eat the most.
Tomato sauce makes it onto a lot of children’s safe food lists and can help them to learn to like new foods over time, so don’t despair if this is the case for your kiddo.
For more about tomato sauce and to see my top product picks, check out the How to Choose guides in Toddler Mealtimes and Family Mealtimes.