Reviews you can trust.
See why.Baby Spoons
Feeding your baby can be stressful; the spoon you use shouldn’t make it more so.
By Published Mar. 5, 2021
Top Picks
What You Need To Know
Once you start feeding solids to your kiddo, at around 4 months, a baby spoon sized for smaller mouths is useful. To find the best spoon for adults to use for feeding babies (versus ones the kids hold themselves), we tested 10 spoons, made from silicone, plastic, bamboo, and metal, using them to feed seven little testers, ages 4 months to 2 years, for a month. We considered how comfortable they were to hold, how well they scooped and served, and how easy they were to clean.
Handle Comfort Was Key but Elusive
We found that fatter, rounded, longer handles were the most comfortable for adults to hold. Five minutes of holding one spoon with a short, narrow, sharp metal handle had us wanting to chuck it across the room. Feeding a wiggling, uncooperative child is chaotic, so a grippy handle was key, too. Silicone was optimal here.
Some of the spoons were overdesigned, with dramatically curved handles or angled bowls. Simpler was better. Spoons that were relatively straight from bowl to handle were more comfortable to hold and angle into the babies’ mouths. The amount of flex was important, too. The handle of one spoon was so bendy that using it was like trying to scoop and serve with a Twizzler. Spoons with relatively stiff handles were easier to direct.
Soft-Edged Bowls Were Best
Bowls with soft edges were better at corralling lingering bits of food (from faces, bowls, plates, etc.) because they gently molded to surfaces and faces, scraping more cleanly.
Bowl size played into our rankings as well. Some bowls were too broad, too narrow, too deep, or too flat. The best bowls were right in the middle, big enough to serve a good-size scoop and hold runnier foods but small enough to fit into little mouths.
Extra Features: Heat Sensors and Spoon Rests
Several of the spoons featured bowls that turned white when the food was too hot to serve. Some of us found this handy.
Several spoons had bumps on the bottoms of their handles that are designed to raise the bowls up off of counters and avoid contamination. We were mostly ambivalent about this feature. There really shouldn’t be anything that dangerous on the counter, for safety reasons. Perhaps if you were camping or feeding your baby on the go, these built-in spoon rests might come in handy.
Cleaning the Baby Spoons
Foods such as carrots and turmeric can discolor plastic and silicone. We saw a problem with only one particular silicone spoon; the rest were fine. Another, the only spoon that was not dishwasher-safe, had a silicone head and a bamboo handle that came apart for cleaning. We worried about the inside of this spoon’s silicone head getting moldy after...
Everything We Tested
Highly Recommended
- Performance:: 3 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 3 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This silicone spoon was the most versatile and comfortable model we tested. The bowl was flexible enough to swoop around and corral food, but the handle was firm enough to efficiently direct it into our kiddos’ mouths. The handle was straight and grippy, with rounded edges, so it was comfortable to hold lots of different ways for maximum versatility.
Recommended
- Performance:: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This plastic spoon’s rounded handle was comfortable and secure though slightly arched, which made angling the food into the baby’s mouth occasionally awkward. The bowl’s squared-off edges were nice for scraping that last bit of food from the corners of the baby’s mouth. The spoon rest (situated under the handle) kept the bowl from touching the surface below if you put it down, which some testers liked.
- Performance:: 2 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 3 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This plastic spoon’s handle was comfortable to hold. Some testers liked that the bowl turned white when the food was too hot for the baby to eat (110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher), but the bowl was a bit too flat for runnier foods, making it less versatile.
- Performance:: 2 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This spoon was comfortable, with a rounded, reasonably grippy handle. A spoon rest kept the bowl elevated, but the bowl itself was a bit too flat, which made it hard to angle into the kiddos’ mouths and prohibited it from holding a big-enough bite of more-liquid foods.
Not Recommended
- Performance:: 1 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 3 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This spoon’s silicone handle was so flexible that it was like trying to feed a baby with Gumby. The handle flexed backward as we tried to maneuver food into our babies’ mouths, making it a frustrating and futile endeavor.
- Performance:: 1 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 3 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This spoon was shaped like a check mark, with the bowl set at an extreme angle from the handle. This meant that it was comfortable only in very specific instances, such as reaching down into a jar of baby food; for every other motion we had to work against the spoon by positioning our arms to compensate for the bowl’s awkward angle.
- Performance:: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 1 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
The arch of this spoon's handle made it hard to maneuver its bowl into the babies’ mouths. The bowl was made of firm plastic, so it was too stiff to mold to surfaces (or faces) to gather up bits of food.
- Performance:: 2 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 2 stars out of 3.
This spoon was too short to be truly comfortable for adults to use for feeding. We liked that it was made from grippy silicone, but unfortunately that tacky silicone held stains more than other models. This spoon’s bowl was also too big for some younger babies, making for messy transfers.
- Performance:: 2 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 0 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 3 stars out of 3.
This spoon had a very narrow metal handle with sharp edges that cut into our hands and made it extremely hard to use for any period of time. The bowl was small and could hold only small amounts of food.
- Performance:: 1 stars out of 3.
- Comfort:: 2 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup:: 1 stars out of 3.
The spoon’s bowl was too wide for babies’ mouths and also for adults to pick up and transport food in a tidy or efficient manner. The handle was narrower, firm, and less comfortable to hold for an extended period of time. This was the only spoon that came apart in two pieces (the silicone bowl pops off the handle), and we were concerned about mold growing inside the head, as we couldn’t tell if it was dry in there.
Reviews you can trust
The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing.
Hannah Crowley
Hannah is an executive editor for ATK Reviews and cohost of Gear Heads on YouTube.
0 Comments
