START planning your school lunch menus now, and feel free to include as many warm or cold foods as you’d like.
Thanks to one savvy mom’s clever tricks, you can keep hot foods warm and cold foods cool with lunchbox hacks that only take seconds.
Parenting genius Shannon Doherty shares pro-level mom hacks on her TikTok page, where she has over 1.9million followers.
In a recent clip, Doherty let viewers in on the effortless, inexpensive methods she uses when packing lunch for her four children.
When you want to keep your kids’ food cold until lunchtime, you can try Doherty’s strategy of popping a specific item in the freezer before packing it in the lunchbox.
“Freeze yogurt pouches,” the mom explained. She held up a portable yogurt tube, frozen solid and ready to go.
This keeps the yogurt cold throughout the day, but also works to cool the other food in the lunchbox.
“They act as ice packs and defrost by lunch,” the mom explained.
Meanwhile, if you’re trying to keep food hot, all you need is a standard thermos to use Doherty’s foolproof hack.
“To keep food warm, fill a thermos with boiling water, then pour it out,” she said.
Doherty demonstrated, filling a thermos with hot water from the kettle, then closing it up.
After a few minutes, she poured out the water and wiped the interior of the thermos dry.
Now, you can put hot food inside the thermos and trust that it will still be toasty at lunchtime. “It stays warm longer,” Doherty said.
Grateful viewers thanked Doherty for sharing her creative strategies ahead of the school year.
“I’m going to need a lot of this kind of hacks soon,” wrote one parent in the comments section.
“I use all these hacks,” wrote another Doherty devotee. “Love them.”
