On hot summer days with 5 grandchildren visiting, popsicles are a needed treat! Fruit popsicles can be healthy, refreshing snack, or they can be a vehicle for too much sugar, pesticides, and other junky ingredients.
As with many food choices, making your own will result in the very healthiest popsicles. This is especially since every store-bought pop comes in plastic.
However, we are all busy and sometimes it makes sense to buy fruit pops to have on hand in the summer.
We only found one brand in the store that we can truly call the healthiest popsicles. But, there are other brands below in our Okay Stuff category that you should still feel fine about handing out on a hot summer day.
Read on for our picks for the healthiest popsicles you can find in a grocery store.
Healthiest Popsicles Cheat Sheet
Healthiest Popsicles: Store-Bought Varieties
One issue with most store-bought fruit pop brands is that they don’t use organic fruit. This is particularly concerning when the fruits included in the popsicles are among this “Dirty Dozen.”
There are several other reasons that the healthiest popsicles are the ones you make at home:
Even if they don’t have sugar in them, packaged popsicles usually contain more juice than actual whole fruit purees. The FDA considers fruit juice concentrates to be a form of added sugar. However, companies don’t have to list fruit juice concentrates as added sugar on the nutrition label if they include enough water.
Store-bought pops–even organic ones–often also contain fillers such as guar gum and locust bean gum. These ingredients are not too worrisome, but they are processed and unneeded in homemade popsicles.
A big concern with store-bought popsicles is the amount of plastic waste they produce--as you can see in this picture.
These pops contain 5 grams of sugar each, and 0 grams of added sugar.
Still, the ingredients are mostly all juice concentrates. As I mentioned above, the FDA considers juice concentrates as added sugar, but if the blend includes enough water, companies don't have to list concentrates as added sugar.
Because these are organic and the sugar content is low, I still consider them Good Stuff.
They have also added organic guar gum to add some bulk (which wouldn't be necessary if they used actual fruit!).
Because they are entirely made of juice concentrates and not whole fruit, I cannot call GoodPop the Best Stuff.
You can buy the GoodPop Freezer Pops in the dry goods section of your grocery store, and then freeze them yourself, which it convenient.
All of the other GoodPop fruit pops are also free of added sugar, but this does not apply to the rest of their lineup, including Orange n’ Cream, Fudge n’ Cream, and Strawberry Shortcake.
GoodPop is the first food brand to be Plastic Neutral Certified with 4ocean — for every pound of plastic GoodPop uses in its products, one pound of plastic will be cleaned up from the oceans.
You can find the basic “fruit” freezer pops piled high in bins at the grocery store all summer long.
These make me sad because they are hard to miss, marketed to kids, and really inexpensive.
The first ingredient is water but this is followed by high fructose corn syrup and then various artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives.
No wonder you can get 24 of these for $1.99–they aren’t even food.
Simply Popsicle
These "fruit" pops are made of water, sugar, gums, and natural flavors.
There is no fruit in them at all--juice or otherwise!
Sneaky Stuff
365 Popsicles
Whole Foods’ 365 brand makes a variety of fruit popsicles, all of which are significantly less healthful than any of the brands we've mentioned above.
The bar version of fruit popsicles are made of mostly juice and cane sugar, with upwards of 20 grams in each bar.
Worse are their Pop-Ups, which are mostly sugar , some 31 grams per pop
Most contain a variety of gums.
These are devoid of any nutrition, offering 0% of recommended daily intake of all vitamins, fiber, etc.
Chloe's
Chloe’s various popsicle varieties are free of artificial colors and flavors, but none of the fruit is organic, and there are 14 grams of sugar in each bar.
We appreciate that Chloe's uses real fruit purees instead of juice.
While there are certainly worse options out there than Chloe’s, we just can’t call something with sugar Good Stuff.
Organic Whole Fruit Frozen Juice
Even Maia, an expert label-reader, was duped by these!
We found them at Costco, and she actually thought from the label (which proclaims “frozen juice!”) and a quick ingredient scan that these were truly just frozen juice.
Later, after tasting one and finding it cloying, she read the label again and discovered white sugar contributed 7 grams of sugar per bar (plus another 8 grams of sugar from fruit juice concentrate).
Outshine
There is some real fruit juice in these, but nothing is organic, and there is far too much sugar in both the pops and the bars.
The No Sugar Added varieties should also be avoided as they contain artificial sweeteners like sucralose–which is not recommended for children or anyone with a sensitive digestive system because it causes diarrhea–and maltodextrin.
Trader Joe’s Fruit Frenzy Bars
The main ingredients in these are water and sugar (not organic).
These are among the sweetest bars we reviewed, with 20 to 30 grams in each!
Healthiest Popsicles Recipe
Homemade popsicles are my favorite in the summer because there are so many fresh fruits available. We suggest you start with a non-toxic, plastic-free popsicle maker. We love these two options, both of which we use every summer:
Next, you need to choose your fruit and puree in a blender (this is the blender we use). I use 2 cups of fresh or frozen organic berries. You can use raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries, or a blend of them. A banana will lend natural sweetness. I also add some freshly squeezed fruit juice; orange makes the popsicles sweet, but lemon or lime can be fun, too.
I then add one additional cup of water. Other add-ins can include plain yogurt or kefir and maybe some greens (we've found romaine lettuce or spinach to be the mildest in flavor). If you want to add a little raw honey or maple syrup, you can, but if you're using ripe fruit it should be sweet enough.
Once you have your blend, just pour and freeze (and drink what's left as a delicious smoothie!).
I hope you have a wonderful summer full of the very healthiest popsicles! Please share your favorite recipes or brands below.
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