Fresh Starts Baby Food Food Mill

I've had three baby food mills over the years: this one is my newest acquisition, the KidCo classic food mill, and the Munchkin food mill. The Munchkin was crap, so I won't waste more words there. The KidCo had its issues, but none too annoying and it did the job well enough, which is not surprising as that's the brand of mill my mom used on us when we were babies. The Fit & Fresh mill is wonderful in many ways: sturdy, neat, efficient. That's about where the positives end, though. While they may seem like really important positives, let's consider the negatives.

First of all, you can't clean it properly, which is my #1 reason for rating it so low as that's kind of a health concern. There is no way to detach the metal grinding mechanism from the plastic casing, so food gets stuck in the cracks and is virtually impossible to extract. Fibrous foods like fish and meat are especially hard to clean out. This is a problem I never had on the KidCo mill as it was all detachable and all cracks and crevices could be cleaned thoroughly. I'd love for someone to come along and correct me here, but after scouring the interwebs for the answer, it seems there simply is none and this is a design flaw on the Fit & Fresh mill.

Secondly, this mill is designed to be used with specially-made containers that are sold separately. Well, my mill came with one container and lid, but if I want to grind something and that container is in use, I'm out of luck unless I purchase a set of four more catchment containers (and lids) for a price. One thing I really miss about the KidCo mill as that you can take it to the table, dump the food in, grind, and feed baby right off the top of the mill. No superfluous pieces, nothing fancy, just mill + food + spoon = happy baby. If I needed to save food for later, I scraped it off the top of the mill and put it in a container I already had in my cupboard.

Thirdly and lastly and somewhat related to the secondly the Fit & Fresh mill is a bit awkward to operate. It's big, and with that catchment container on the bottom, it slides around and if you're grinding something a bit tough, the whole bottom part rotates along with the crank, which totally defeats the purpose of the grinding action. I don't have a third hand to push down on the top of the mill, turn the crank, AND hold the bottom half in place, so I have to jam it between my body and the counter's edge. Or have my eight-year-old hold it. Or forget altogether and wonder why it's taking ages to make the dang food. Again, design flaw.

So yeah, it's a nice concept and pretty to look at, but there's a reason the classic design of KidCo's mill has stood the test of time it does the job and nothing more or less. Now, this is not necessarily an endorsement of KidCo's mill in reading around, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably give the Kidalog mill a try. That one sounds awesome. But don't waste your money on the Fit & Fresh system. Go classic and you won't regret it.

This is hard to clean, and unless the food is already super soft it is really difficult to grind up. You can't remove the metal plate that grates the food, so bits get stuck around the edges. Every now and then I'll go in with a toothpick and get the bits out, but it's annoying.

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I had one like this for my baby who now is expection her first child. I loved mine and think that she will love hers also.

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