50 Healthy Trick Or Treat Ideas
Halloween is such a fun holiday and definitely one of our favorites. Our kids love to dress up, go to parties, and definitely trick-or-treat! It seems like it is the beginning of the holiday season and sometimes that means that nutrition goes out the window. After a fun night of trick-or-treating, my kids come home with HUGE bags of candy! But more than just the sugar overload, there are a few different reasons to handout something a little healthier to the trick-or treaters that come to your house:
- Food Allergies. There are more and more kids that have food allergies. If you haven’t heard about the Teal Pumpkin Project, it is a really great thing for kids with food allergies. The purpose is to raise awareness of food allergies and helps to include all trick-or-treaters throughout the Halloween season. If you will be providing non-food treats to trick-or-treaters, then you put a teal colored pumpkin on your porch to let parents and kids with food allergies know they can come to your home to get a safe treat.
- Dye Sensitivities. A lot of different candy contains food dyes which many parents are concerned about. Food dyes can have an effect on some children with hyperactivity, mood swings, and inability to concentrate.
- Dental Health. Dentists agree that the worst type of sweets for kids’ teeth are the sticky or gummy type. The sticky material coats teeth, and cavity causing bacteria have an opportunity to grow and spread. Dentists recommend to limit sugar intake, consume healthy foods that strengthen teeth, and brush regularly.
If you don’t pass out candy, then what can you do on Halloween? Non-food items can be really fun and just as much of a ‘treat’ as any type of candy they would get. These ideas are things that kids really love and will get excited about!
Non-Food Trick Or Treat Ideas
- Wikki Stix
- Glow Bracelets/Mini Glow Sticks
- Bendable Character Toys
- Silicone Finger Puppets
- Bendable Spiders
- Mini Squishy Toys
- Sticky Hands
- Mini Slimes
- Sticky Frogs
- Temporary Tattoos
- Mini Stamps
- Punch Balloons
- Mini Slinky
- Slap Bracelets
- Novelty Erasers
- Bouncy Balls
- Mini Flashlights
- Character Toothbrushes
- Scented Monster Markers
- Mini Playdough
- Mini Novelty Erasers
- Mini Fidget Spinners
- Mustache Lip Whistles
- LED Finger Lights
- Multi Color Pens
What about if you still want to hand out some kind of food item? There are plenty of options besides candy! These are some of our favorite portable, healthy and fun foods that would be perfect to hand out to trick-or-treaters!
Healthy Trick Or Treat Food Options
- Fruit Leather
- Applesauce Pouches
- Cuties
- Honey Sticks
- Mini Raisin Boxes
- Mini Popcorn Packs
- Mini Granola Bars
- Freeze Dried Apple Packs
- Trail Mix Individual Packs
- Banana Chips
- Annie’s Whole Wheat Bunnies
- Mini LaraBars
- String Cheese with ghost faces drawn on
- Smart Cracker packs
- Clif Kid Z Bars
- Mini water bottles
- Sugar-free gum (with xylitol)
- Mini baby carrot bags
- Mini fruit cups in natural juices
- Snack size pretzel packs
- Mini Craisin Boxes
- Whole fruit (small apples or oranges)
- Annie’s Fruit Snacks
- Roasted Chickpea Snack Packs
- To-go Sunflower Seed Packs
More Healthy Halloween Ideas:
- 13 Healthy Halloween Themed Dinner Ideas
- How to Plan a Healthy Halloween Party
- Frankenstein Pasta for Halloween
- 4 Spooky Halloween Snacks
Natalie Monson
I'm a registered dietitian, mom of 4, avid lover of food and strong promoter of healthy habits. Here you will find lots of delicious recipes full of fruits and veggies, tips for getting your kids to eat better and become intuitive eaters and lots of resources for feeding your family.
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I love how many more parents are thinking about the health impacts of all the junk food kids collect at Halloween. But we need to see more people thinking about the health impacts of some of the non-food junk associated with Halloween as well!
All the plastic replacements for candy — besides further polluting the environment our kids will have to live in — have been shown to contain phthalates, PVC, and heavy metals, which have wide-ranging impacts on kids’ health. I hope people choose the least plastic, most useful things to put out for non-food options. Novelty pencils might be one of the few!
I think we definitely all agree we want to do what is best for our kids health and that might look different for everyone. My brother-in-law is a dentist and they hand out toothbrushes to trick-or-treaters and definitely spend extra to do that. Some people can’t afford more than a simple piece of candy. Some people might want to participate in the teal pumpkin project, but can’t afford some of the nicer non-candy options. I hope that each parent reading this can do their best to make Halloween fun and healthy for kids and those in their communities without judgement from other parents and that we can be grateful to live in a society that has the option to treat-or-treat at all!
Another cheap/healthy idea to add to the list is to share tiny seed packets (pieces of paper folded in half and taped shut/labeled work great!) each containing a few seeds from whatever we are already growing or from some cheap packets we bought. Trick or treating might provide an ideal opportunity for a Trunk Or Treat/Neighborhood Seed Swap option …an extra level of cool for the kids if they knew abcxyz (or a certain number) of mysterious houses/trunks would be providing seeds and they tried to “plant em all!” Especially if there was a fun story made up about collecting all the “Maybe Magic” seeds, like a scavenger hunt. The question could be to find out which ones are “magic” (grow) and which are just duds. If the kids feel the coolest places are those who give out the desired seeds it might help other adults have the courage to try it next year and spread the idea…
PS. it can be hard to be different but sometimes getting something weird is more fun: my friend said he used to leave out canned foods in his candy bucket every year experimentally, and every year they all disappeared and he’d hear kids being all excited about their “can” just cuz it was different!
I love this idea! Kids really do love the unique and would probably think its fun.