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Starting Solids

Somewhere to Sit

Before anyone eats anything, bub needs somewhere to sit, and the chair aisle has quietly become its own ecosystem.

High Chair

The command centre for the next two-ish years, so how it lives in your house matters more than you might expect. The spectrum runs from a $30 plastic number you can hose off in the backyard to timber chairs that grow with your child, but once you're wiping breakfast, lunch and dinner off it every day, easy-to-clean starts looking considerably more exciting than padded and pretty.

For safety, look for a sturdy, stable chair with a five-point harness that meets Australian Standard AS 4684.

High Chair Cushion

Some high chairs (especially the timber grow-with-me styles) are gorgeous but about as padded as a park bench, and a brand new sitter can slump sideways in all that space. A cushion pads bub out so they sit snug and upright. Just check it's machine washable, because it will wear more dinner than the bib does.

High Chair Footrest

Nobody warns you about this one. Dangling feet can make it harder for little kids to sit comfortably and steadily while they eat, which is why foot support suddenly becomes a thing once you start looking at high chairs. If yours has an adjustable built-in footrest, you're sorted; if it doesn't, clip-on versions exist for exactly this problem.

High Chair Toy

There's a gap between bub going in the chair and the food arriving, and that gap has a scream in it. A suction toy sticks to the tray and buys you the ninety seconds it takes to mash a banana. Some kids decide the toy is more interesting than dinner, so read the room.

Portable High Chair

Grandma's house doesn't have a high chair, and the cafe's one has mystery crust on the straps. Portable versions range from fabric harnesses that fold into the nappy bag to clip-on seats that attach to suitable tables, giving bub a familiar seat when there isn't a high chair around. If you eat out a lot or split time between houses, this one can earn its spot fast.

Toddler Booster Seat

The middle child between the high chair and a big-kid chair. It straps onto a normal dining chair and boosts your toddler up to table height, usually with a harness for the wrigglers. Great when the high chair starts feeling babyish (their words, delivered around 18 months) or when floor space is tight.

Toddler Dining Chair

And this one's the booster's lookalike: a standalone, toddler-sized chair that brings them to table height on its own legs, no adult chair required. Think the grow-with-me timber styles. If you're choosing between the two, boosters travel and store better, dining chairs feel more like real furniture and last longer. Plenty of families never own either and just wait out the high chair.

Making the Food

You do not need a small kitchen appliance to mash a pumpkin. But if you're batch cooking, some of these save your sanity.

Ready-Made Baby Food

Some nights dinner is not happening, and that's how a pouch earns permanent residency in the pantry. Jars and pouches take zero prep, keep for ages and travel easily, so some families use them regularly and others keep a couple in reserve for the nights that fall apart.

Baby Food Maker

If your plan involves a Sunday afternoon, a bag of veg and a week of dinners in the freezer, this is the gadget aimed squarely at you. It steams and then purees in the same jug, so there's one thing to load, one to wash and nothing to tip from pot to blender while it's hot. A saucepan and a blender get you to the same place with more washing up, so it comes down to how much of your feeding is purees.

Food Blender

The regular kitchen kind, or a stick blender, pressed into baby duty. It does most of what a baby food maker does except the steaming, and keeps earning its keep making smoothies and soups long after the puree stage is over. If you already own one, a dedicated baby food maker may be solving a problem you don't have.

Food Masher

You're at a cafe, bub's lunch is coming off your own plate, and a fork is doing a poor job on avocado. A small masher, often sold with its own bowl, squishes one serve at a time and lives in the nappy bag between outings. At home a fork honestly handles most of it, so this one earns its spot out and about rather than on the bench.

Cookbook

A starting solids cookbook does more than recipes: the good ones walk you through what to offer when, how to handle allergens, and what texture to aim for at each stage. If you're a "just tell me what to do" person at 5pm, having a plan on the bench beats scrolling one-handed through nine contradictory blogs.

Freezer Pods

One pumpkin becomes fourteen dinners, which is the whole argument for batch cooking. Puree goes into the little silicone wells, freezes solid, and pops out in meal-sized blocks you can bag up and defrost one at a time. The ones with measurements moulded into the wells make tiny serves easier to portion out.

Storage Containers

Little lidded containers for fridge leftovers, prepped finger foods and freezer batches too big for pods. You almost certainly own containers already, so this is less "buy new" and more "accept that your good ones are about to be annexed". Small sizes matter here; baby serves are tiny and giant containers freezer-burn them.

Food Tracker

A journal or app where you log what bub tried and how it went. It makes more sense if you're deliberately keeping track of new foods or reactions and know you'll want a record to look back on. If you're not, this can very quickly become another app you forget to open.

Fresh Food Feeder

If watching a six-month-old wrestle with a slippery piece of pear makes you nervous, this is the product aimed squarely at that moment. Soft fruit or other food goes inside a mesh or silicone pouch and bub gums and sucks it through the holes while holding the handle themselves. Some families like it as a stepping stone into self-feeding; others go straight to finger foods and never need one.

At the Table

Where the suction lookalikes live. Spoon-fed purees lean towards bowls, baby-led weaning leans towards plates, and everything here gets thrown, which is why "does it bounce" is a real buying criteria.

Baby Spoon

Try a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer once and you'll see the problem: too deep, too hard, far too big for a mouth that size. The soft tips and shallow bowls go easy on gums, and the short chunky handles on some let bub have a go themselves from the start.

Kids Cutlery

The next size up, for toddlers graduating to feeding themselves. Chunky handles, blunt fork prongs that still actually spear food, and knives that cut a banana but not a finger. This one arrives later in the solids story, so no need to buy it alongside the first spoons unless you love a complete set.

Dinnerware

Whatever you serve dinner on is going to hit the floor eventually, which is why baby dinnerware tends to be made from materials designed to survive the drop. Before you fall for the matching set, check how it actually fits your life, particularly whether it can go in the dishwasher or microwave. Divided plates are weirdly polarising, and some kids treat the separation of foods as a legal matter.

Suction Bowl

The flinging tends to start right around the time the eating does. A suction base grips the high chair tray so the bowl stays put when it's shoved, which suits the puree and porridge era when there's something scoopable to keep contained. Fair warning from the trenches: determined toddlers treat the suction as a puzzle, and some solve it by week two.

Suction Plate

If you're choosing between the suction twins, think about what will actually be going on it: scoopable food leans bowl, finger food leans plate. Some families end up with both, and plenty discover their child is perfectly happy eating straight from the high-chair tray.

Placemat

Once bub moves off the high chair tray and onto the actual table you'd like to keep nice, the splash zone becomes your problem. A wipeable mat marks out their patch and catches what lands. Some come with a built-in lip or divided sections, at which point they're basically a plate impersonating a placemat.

Sippy Cup

The training-wheels cup: handles for little hands and some combination of spout, straw or valve designed to stop every drink ending up on the floor. It's useful once water joins mealtimes and bub wants to hold the cup themselves, although the supposedly spill-proof ones vary wildly in how spill-proof they actually are. Just remember every extra valve and tiny straw is another tiny thing you'll eventually have to wash.

Containing the Mess

Weaning is interior redecoration with extra steps. This is your damage control.

Bib

The classic for a reason. For solids you want the wipeable kind (silicone or coated fabric) over the cloth dribble bibs you've been using, because pumpkin puree laughs at cotton. The ones with a scoop pocket at the bottom double as a snack-recovery system, which bub will discover before you do.

Smock Bib

The bib's full-coverage cousin: long sleeves, covers the whole outfit, ties or velcros at the back. This is for baby-led weaning, spaghetti night, and any child who eats with their elbows. They also tend to turn up on daycare lists, because “artwork smock” and “yoghurt smock” are essentially the same garment.

Food Catcher

Sometimes a deep-pocket bib on steroids, sometimes a tray that bridges the gap between high chair and child. Either way the job is the same: intercept food between mouth and floor. If your high chair has a gap bub posts food through like a tiny mail slot, this is the fix.

Tray Liner

Wiping down a high chair tray after bolognese is the worst two minutes of the day, and it happens three times a day. A silicone or disposable sheet takes the hit instead, then peels off for cleaning or disposal. If your tray lifts off and fits neatly in the sink, this may be solving a problem you don't have; if it doesn't, suddenly the extra layer makes a lot more sense.

Splat Mat

On tiles, a quick mop handles it. On carpet, or in a rental with pale floorboards, what lands under the high chair is a genuine problem. A big wipeable sheet spread underneath catches the lot and shakes out into the bin. A cut-open garbage bag technically does the same job; this is the version you're not embarrassed about when visitors come.

Wet Bag

Solids go mobile around the same time your nappy bag stops having any spare room. The yoghurt-soaked smock, damp bib and food-covered outfit get zipped away until you're home instead of touching everything else in there. You may already own one from swimming or cloth nappies, and yes, it's the same bag.

Out & About

Solids don't stay home. The gear splits into two eras: pouch-and-spoon for the early months, then the snack cups and containers that take over once bub starts self-feeding.

Food Pouch Spoon/Spout

You're in a car park with a pouch and no spoon, which is how most mums meet this product. A little attachment screws onto the pouch top and turns it into either a spoon you feed with or a soft spout bub can eat from. It solves one very specific problem, feeding a pouch without carrying a separate spoon, so whether it earns a spot depends mostly on how often pouches leave the house with you.

Reusable Food Pouches

If pouches become a regular part of the rotation, the disposable ones add up quickly. Reusable versions let you fill your own with puree or yoghurt, wash them and go again. The catch is the washing: puree loves a corner, so the ones that open fully are considerably less annoying than narrow-necked styles.

Food Bottle

Feeding puree on a pram walk with a bowl in one hand ends exactly how you'd expect. Squeeze the bottle and the puree comes through a spoon on the end, so it's one hand, no lid, nothing to balance. Niche, and the mums who use them use them constantly.

Insulated Food Jar

Warm bolognese at the park in July, cold yoghurt at the beach in January. A mini thermos keeps food hot or cold when lunch has to leave the house with you, and unlike most of the baby-specific gear on this page, it'll probably still be doing lunchbox duty when bub's in primary school.

Insulated Lunch Bag

Once daycare starts, you're packing food that has to survive from drop-off to afternoon tea. This is the bag that carries the lot, jar and pouches and snacks and ice brick, keeping it all cold in between. Any cooler bag you already own does the same job until then.

Snack Container

Crackers, cut fruit, and the sultanas holding your toddler's entire personality together. Any lidded container works, which is worth knowing before you buy a new one. The toddler-specific versions are just smaller, tougher and less inclined to spring open at the bottom of the bag.

Snack Cup

This is the one that survives being hurled from the pram. A soft slitted lid lets little hands reach in but keeps the crackers where they are when it goes upside down, which it will. Watching a one-year-old work out the slits for the first time is genuinely great content.

Snackle Box

Yes, it's a tackle box for snacks, and yes, the name is the best thing in this article. A compartment box you load with little bits of everything: cheese here, berries there, crackers in the corner. Peak usefulness is road trips, plane rides and picnics, when handing over six little snacks one at a time becomes its own full-time job. At home, it's essentially a very charming compartment container.

Washing Up

Straw cups, pouches and valves all come apart into fiddly little pieces with corners a sponge can't reach. This is the gear that gets into them.

Bottle Brush

You likely own one from bottle feeding, and it now moonlights cleaning sippy cups, pouches and the skinny corners of the food bottle. The long handle and small brush head get into places your regular dish brush won't, but if all your feeding gear opens wide enough for a sponge, you may already have this problem covered.

Straw Cleaner

The moment a straw cup arrives, you'll discover the inside of a straw is apparently its own cleaning jurisdiction. These tiny skinny brushes run right through places a sponge, bottle brush and dishwasher can't easily reach. Some cups include one in the box, so check before buying another set.

Dishwasher Basket

Spoon tips, pouch lids, straw bits and valve pieces are all suspiciously good at disappearing through a dishwasher rack. A little lidded basket keeps the tiny pieces together through the wash instead of having you hunt around the bottom afterwards. If your feeding gear doesn't have many removable bits, or you're handwashing them anyway, this one may never earn cupboard space.

Every product here solved a real problem for a real family.

You won't know which problems are yours until you're actually feeding the baby in front of you. Maybe you've got a serene puree accepter. Maybe a committed food flinger. Maybe a tiny engineer who defeats the suction plate in under a week. That's when this list becomes useful: come back when a problem appears and see what exists to solve it.

The shops aren't going anywhere.