How often have you looked at the limited number of foods your child eats and seen an opportunity?
Never, right?
I know. It’s hard to see the glass half full when your child eats only one specific shape of macaroni and cheese from one specific brand. But after helping so many very picky eaters expand their diets to include more foods, I now see potential when parents share their child’s limited food list.
Would you believe me if I told you there is an effective way (well, several, actually) to get your picky eater to try new foods? And that this way is rooted specifically in your child’s unique food preferences.
This one effective technique is called food chaining or food bridging.
Food Chaining
A Proven Strategy to Get Your Picky Eater to Eat More Foods
This article will answer the following questions about food chaining:
- What is food bridging?
- How does food bridging work?
- Will food chaining work for my picky eater?
- How can I start creating customized food chains for my child?
What Is Food Bridging?
Food chaining is a step-by-step journey to expand your child’s diet and increase their food flexibility.
Food chaining works by using small steps and intentional changes to preferred foods that, over time, create a bridge leading to a completely novel food.
How Does Food Bridging Work?
A food bridge originates with an accepted food, one that your child eats willingly and reliably. A bridge is created by making gradual changes to the accepted food over time. You can end with goal food or just see where the bridge takes you.
The changes you make along a food chain can involve any sensory dimension: taste, texture, appearance, and temperature. For children with sensory sensitivities, temperature is often overlooked, but a child who refuses cold foods may accept the same food at room temperature, or vice versa. Starting with whichever sensory dimension feels least threatening to your child is always a good move.
For example, a food bridge may start with a child’s favorite brand of chicken nuggets and end with baked fish.
The early stages of this bridge could also include new brands and shapes of chicken nuggets. Gradually, as a child comes to routinely accept the new food in each baby step, the offerings evolve to something similar yet completely new like breaded fish nuggets or and eventually baked fish.
See another example of a food chain below. This food bridge starts with an accepted food of Goldfish crackers”and works its way through a number of small gradual changes to eventually end at the goal food of grilled cheese.
You get it, but one more example just for fun (and for all the Oreo lovers out there!)
Now that you see how food chaining works, you’re probably wondering….
Could Food Chaining Help Your Picky Eater?
Yes! Food chaining is beneficial for any selective eater and is especially beneficial for kids with sensory sensitivities.
Food chaining isn’t your typical “try this new food” approach. Instead of offering your child any random food you want them to eat, hoping that maybe, just maybe this time they will eat it, you are strategically and intentionally introducing foods they are likely to eat based on their unique preferences.
You use these preferences to your advantage and make small changes while waiting to advance until the new foods become accepted foods.
Part of why food chaining works so well for extreme picky eaters (including kids with sensory food aversions) is because it takes into account the sensory experience of eating. The approach minimizes the anxiety that many picky eaters experience when asked to eat a new food.
Keep in Mind
Food chaining works:
Every child I’ve used food chaining with has benefited and in a clinical study, after three months of food chaining feeding therapy, ten selective eaters increased their number of accepted foods from 5 to 20.5.
Note that that level of success with food chaining took time.
It can help to remember that every step of a food chain is progress.
One more thing worth knowing: research suggests it can take 6–15 exposures to a new food before a child is ready to try it, and that’s for typical eaters. For highly selective eaters, it can take even longer.
When Food Chaining Alone Isn’t Enough
Food chaining is a powerful tool for selective eaters across a wide range of severity, but it works best when a child’s anxiety around food is manageable enough to engage with the process. If your child is gagging or vomiting at the sight of new foods, losing weight, eating fewer than 15–20 foods, or showing significant distress at mealtimes, food chaining at home may not be enough on its own. These can be signs of a more complex feeding disorder like ARFID, which typically requires support from a feeding therapist, dietitian, or multidisciplinary team.
Food chaining may still be part of the approach, but it works best when the underlying sensory or anxiety piece is addressed at the same time.
How to Get Started
If you’re ready to start building your own food bridges or want to learn more about this effective strategy, download the FREE Foolproof Food Bridging Guide.
Food Chaining Examples
Here are a few more food chaining examples you can try at home.
Quesadilla to Pizza
Pizza is one of the top “goal foods” I hear about from parents of picky eaters and I get it. Pizza shows up everywhere, birthday parties, classroom celebrations, and soccer team dinners.If your child already enjoys cheese quesadillas, that’s a great starting point for a food bridge. By making small, manageable changes like adding a sprinkle of Italian seasoning or using a different type of cheese – you can build gentle stepping stones that lead closer to pizza.
Pizza to Quesadilla
If your child loves pizza, but wants to work towards quesadillas you can just do the food bridge backwards.
Veggie Straws to Green Beans
This food bridge utilizes one of my secret weapons for helping picky eaters feel more comfortable eating fruits or vegetables.
Learn more about using frozen and freeze-dried foods as stepping stones to new foods: Fruits and Veggies for Picky Eaters.
Food Chaining Books
Food Chaining by Cheri Fraker, Dr. Mark Fishbein, Sibyl Cox & Laura Walbert
The book that started it all. Written by a pediatric feeding team, this is the foundational guide to the food chaining method, using taste, texture, and temperature similarities to gradually bridge familiar foods to new ones. A great starting point for understanding the technique.
Just Take a Bite by Lori Ernsperger & Tania Stegen-Hanson
If your child gags at the sight of new foods, eats fewer than 20 foods, or melts down at mealtimes, this one’s for you. With a foreword by Temple Grandin, it digs into the sensory and behavioral reasons behind resistant eating and gives parents practical tools to help.
Stories of Extreme Picky Eating by Jennifer Friedman, MS RD
Sometimes you just need to know you’re not alone. This book shares real stories of children with severe food aversions and the strategies that actually helped them. Written by a pediatric dietitian specializing in extreme picky eating and ARFID, it’s equal parts reassurance and roadmap.
CBT for Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder by Jennifer Thomas, Kamryn Eddy, et al.
The clinical reference for treating ARFID using cognitive behavioral therapy. While it’s written for therapists, parents of children with significant food anxiety will find it useful for understanding the evidence-based framework behind exposure-based treatment. If your child’s food avoidance is fear-driven, this is the book that explains what’s actually happening, what works, and why.
Recap
Food chaining is a tool that helps you identify foods that your child is most likely to eat. Food chaining gives you a framework for introducing new foods in a way that your child is most likely to accept. Essentially it’s an individualized and systematic approach to help your picky eater try new foods. It is based on your child’s food preferences and the sensory profile of those foods. Food chaining starts with an assessment of the flavor, texture and visual properties of your child’s favorite foods and ends with a selected goal food.
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