This article will cover whether or not it is better to order from the kid’s menu at a restaurant or not for your children. This will look at the pros and cons of ordering from the kid’s menu at a restaurant for your children to determine whether it is a better choice financially, if it is faster, and if it is healthier for your kids. When restaurants made the kid’s menu, most of the time their decisions aren’t made to provide better financial choices for you or healthier choices for your kids. It is done with the thought of their customers in mind, but particularly for the taste buds of your children.
Usually the kid meals on the kid’s menu in a restaurant are made up of simplicity. This means that they want your children to enjoy their food choices on their menus, without giving them something that most kids may not want to eat. The food is usually always going to be a simple meal comprised of common great tasting foods that everyone is familiar with. Examples are mac n cheese, small cheese burgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches. What do all these foods have in common that most kids like? Cheese.
Of course, these examples don’t comprise of all the many other kid meals out there that restaurants have to offer, but you will find a lot of similarities with many other different types of kid meals that restaurants offer on their kid’s menu.
Is ordering kid meals a better choice if I am in a hurry?
Kid meals are usually simple meals for kids on the restaurant’s kid’s menu, so that means, yes. Ordering from the kid’s menu is a better option in the terms of speed of delivery for your children. If you are in a hurry and need to feed your kids, or just have a lot of children to feed in a hurry, ordering from the kid’s menu is the fastest way to get your food.
Restaurants usually take longer to make their other foods from their main menu in comparison, because they are more complex than what is on the kid’s menu. Most restaurants find it a relief to serve meals to a lot of children, over serving the adults, because the foods on the kid’s menu are usually faster and easier to make. Some restaurants are capable of serving hundreds of kid’s meals in less than 30 minutes.
Some kid meals on a restaurant’s kid’s menu are so fast and easy to make, that they only take seconds to make after the restaurant has opened for the day and finished all their pre-work. For example, a restaurant can have soups available on their kid’s menu that only require scooping the soup into a bowl or container and serving it with a side of toast or bread.
In cases where kid meals aren’t arriving to the table until all the food is served (from the main menu), is because the restaurant is trying to make sure that all the guests that ordered the food receive all of their food at nearly the same time. This way, everyone can eat together and leave together. If everyone in the group ordered from the kid’s menu, then all of the food would be made faster.
Is ordering from the kid’s menu for my kids a healthier choice?
Ordering food from the kid’s menu for your children at a restaurant isn’t generally a healthier choice. The goal of restaurants in general isn’t to provide individuals with food that is the healthiest and also tastes the best. Their goal is to provide people (and children too) with tasty foods that they will like to eat all the time when they are hungry.
Taste and food texture are the things that most restaurants prioritize the most over delivering healthy foods. This doesn’t mean that the kid’s menu in a restaurant can’t be a healthier choice. It just means that an individual shouldn’t expect that a restaurant made the kid’s menu for that purpose. Because of the simplicity of the food items on most kid’s menus that restaurants have, it may inevitably lead to healthier choices for your children. This does depend on what is being offered on their main menu in comparison to what they are offering on their kid’s menu.
For instance, a small cheeseburger with only ketchup could be a healthier choice than a complex burger from their main menu that has bacon, multiple sauces, and other additions. Because restaurants are aiming to please the appetites of children on their kid’s menu, it unwillingly becomes a healthier choice for children in circumstances like this.
On the other hand, restaurants sometimes offer small portions of food that would be more suitable for children in the healthier eating department, that are not on the kid’s menu. As mentioned, they aren’t included in the kid’s menu, because they are foods that most kids wouldn’t prefer to eat over what is offered on their kid’s menu. An example of this is a delicious, small, grilled chicken salad on the main menu or side menu. This obviously wouldn’t be on most restaurants’ kid’s menus, but it could be a healthier choice that could satisfy a kid’s appetite.
Cheese isn’t the healthiest foods for people to have in large amounts. They contain saturated fats, which are the bad fats that clog arteries. Cheese tastes good to most kid’s, so restaurants use it a lot. Sauces in excess also aren’t the healthiest thing, as they contain a lot of sugars. Some of the foods offered on the kid’s menu can be centered around adding things like this to appeal to kids. Despite this, sometimes it is better to go with what is on the kid’s menu, instead of trying to force your children to eat things that they don’t like from the main menu.
Kids are energetic. They play off, run off, and inevitably exercise off more than what most adults eat for their size anyways. Just don’t let your kids order their kid meals with extra sauces, cheese, and other tasty add ons to their food than generally what the restaurant is already generically offering with the kid’s meal.
Is ordering from the kid’s menu better for me financially?
Usually when restaurants determine the price of their meals, it is done in a way that doesn’t benefit the person ordering the food for the better or the worst financially. This means that ordering food for your children to eat and be satisfied, doesn’t do better financially most of the time than if it was just ordered from the kid’s menu.
On some cases, ordering from the kid’s menu can be a better choice, since it requires less labor for the restaurant to make the kid’s meals than it does for the food offered on the main menu. However, it can also be better financially for parents that have a lot of children to just order the food from the main menu in bulk. A few large meals can sometimes be split into servings that are suitable for a lot of children at a lower price, than if they had ordered all individual kid meals.
This is usually only the case for restaurants that offer an option to buy one or more specific food items on their main menu in bulk. It also depends on how many children you are trying to feed, on whether or not it is more beneficial financially to order this way, instead of ordering individual meals from the kid’s menu.
