8 Reasons Multi-sensory Meals Matter

Multi-sensory meals may sound like a fancy new meal-prep subscription with a hefty price tag. They’re not! Put simply, they are meals that engage all the senses and are essential for your baby’s development. They’re easy to prepare and offer a world of enrichment for your little one.

We caught up with resident Sensory Scientist and Nutritionist Zenia Deogan to get the inside track on how to start serving power-packed multi-sensory meals today.

Before we start, it’s worth a quick refresher on the senses and their roles. First, you might be surprised to hear that there are more than the traditional five you learn at school.

The 8 Senses - A Quick Refresher

Smell (Olfactory)

Babies are born with a strong sense of smell. It’s considered one of their most developed senses at birth, allowing them to readily identify familiar scents like their mother's breast milk and body odour.

Sight (Visual)

The least developed sense in babies at birth, but by weaning age, is a key driver in nurturing curiosity and engagement.

Taste (Gustatory)

Babies can distinguish between sweet, sour, salty, and bitter tastes shortly after birth. A natural response to evolution means more taste buds are initially at the back of the mouth, where breast or bottle milk lands. Sweet taste buds are the most dominant at birth, and it can take a while to accept sour and bitter tastes.

Touch (Tactile)

The sense of touch is important as it gives babies information about shape, size, texture, temperature and pressure. In weaning, it plays a key and early role in the acceptance of getting messy and exploring curiosity around new foods.

Sound (Auditory)

Hearing is fully developed at birth, and little ones are well attuned to their parents' voices. It’s worth remembering that the initial internal noises of eating when starting solids will be similar to drinking milk. Still, as your little one progresses to more textures, they’ll be experiencing new sounds as they navigate crunchy, crispy, more complex textures.

Vestibular (Balance)

A baby’s sense of balance and movement. It develops in the womb but really kicks in between 6-12 months when babies begin to sit unaided, crawl, pull themselves up and walk.

Proprioception (Movement)

This internal sense describes your little ones' awareness of their body, position, and location. It uses receptors in muscles and joints to help them understand their body in relation to itself.

Interoception (Internal Signals)

Helps babies feel what is happening inside their bodies and is closely linked to self-regulation, the ability to manage reactions to feelings and the environment. Typical examples are understanding thirst and hunger.

8 Reasons Multi-sensory Meals Matters

So, why are multi-sensory meals important?

Research indicates that incorporating multi-sensory experiences during the weaning process can significantly benefit infants' development and eating habits. Giving your little one the freedom to explore food and encouraging complete immersion using all of their senses has wide-reaching benefits that lay the foundations for their future growth and success.

1. Encourages Food Acceptance

Exposure to different textures, colours, smells, and flavours helps infants become more open to new foods, reducing food neophobia (fear of new foods).

2. Enhances Sensory Development & Food Recognition

Engaging multiple senses during mealtimes strengthens sensory processing skills, crucial for overall brain development and learning.

3. Supports Oral Motor Skills

Exploring various textures (smooth, crunchy, lumpy) helps infants develop chewing and safe swallowing skills, which are essential for speech and oral function.

4. Boosts Independence and Self-Feeding

Allowing babies to touch, grasp, and manipulate food improves fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, helping them learn to self-feed.

5. Creates a Positive Mealtime Experience

A variety of sensory stimuli make meals more engaging and enjoyable, reducing stress and mealtime battles for both parents and children.

6. Improves Cognitive and Emotional Development

Sensory-rich experiences strengthen brain connections and create new neural pathways. These help stimulate development and encourage curiosity, problem-solving, and emotional connections with food.

7. Encourages Healthy Eating Habits

Early exposure to diverse food textures and flavours increases the likelihood of children maintaining a varied and nutritious diet as they grow.

8. Reduces Picky Eating

Familiarity with different sensory experiences during weaning makes children more adaptable to new foods, decreasing the likelihood of selective eating later.

How do I serve multisensory meals?

The fact is, you’re probably already doing it without realising it. The key is offering diverse flavours, tastes and textures at as many meal and snack times as possible. Try not to overthink it too much. It can be as simple as considering combinations and pairings. For example, if you’re serving yoghurt, add some crushed berries. Instantly, you’ve amplified the colour and texture profile and have a contrast of creamy and tangy tastes.

Take a simple plate of fish and chips. Swap the oven chips for sweet potato wedges - you can even add a touch of paprika for a spice hit. Infuse the peas with mint and add a wedge of zesty lemon. You can even make your own cod goujons if you have more time. Simply dip your fish strips of choice into flour, then whisked egg and coat with panko breadcrumbs for a crunchy texture.

Here are some other things to consider when you’re preparing a plate:

Balance Textures: Include soft, crunchy, smooth, and firm items.

Incorporate Flavours: Offer sweet, sour, bitter, savoury, and mildly spicy foods to expand taste tolerance. 

Visual Appeal: Use bright, natural colours to engage your baby’s sight and offer a range of colours simultaneously

Aroma Play: Add fresh herbs, mild spices, or zesty citrus foods to awaken their sense of smell.

Whole foods: Let them handle entire foods while you’re preparing meals so they understand what foods look like, how they feel and where they come from.

Communication: Expose them to cooking sounds and describe them verbally. Introduce colours to them during mealtimes to expand their vocabulary and cognition.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, look out on our socials for our new series of Pimp Their Plate with Zenia from The Flavour Academy. Together, we’ll bring you super-speedy ways to add simple twists to regular plates of food to take them from every day to powerful plates of positivity and development. You can find more inspiration in Zenia’s book, The Flavour Academy Cookbook here.