Finding tasty, suitable and kid-friendly snacks for a child on a gluten free diet can be a challenge. Add to it that my son also requires dairy-free products and it can be even more daunting. I was shopping at the local organic and natural foods store one day and spotted a few different snack cookies that actually met his dietary requirements. Given the choice between these chocolate cookies and a vanilla flavor my son selected these Orgran Outback Animals Chocolate Cookies. I don't remember exactly what I paid but I believe it was somewhere around $4 for the 6.2 oz box.

About Orgran Outback Animals Chocolate Cookies
Orgran is an Australian manufacturer of Organic foods and all of their products are gluten free and suitable for Celiacs or anyone on a gluten-free/wheat free diet. These cookies are:

Gluten Free
Wheat Free
Dairy Free
Egg Free
Yeast Free
Soy Free
GMO Free
Nut Free
and VEGAN.

The ingredients in these cookies are:
Maize starch, raw sugar, brown rice flour, pea flour, palm vegetable oil, rice syrup, cocoa powder 2.5%, psyllium 2%, raising agent, sodium bicarbonate, calcium carbonate, emulsifier: monoglycerides from vegetable, vegetable gum: guar, salt.

Orgran Outback Animals Chocolate Cookies are small chocolate cookies that look like animal crackers with a slightly harder and crunchier consistency to them. Instead of the usual circus animals they are animals from the Outback - kangaroos, koalas, bandicoots and wombats (at least I think that is what they are supposed to be!).

My son has been quite pleased with these chocolate cookies which make for a crunchy snack and are perfect to send in a ziploc snack baggie with his school lunch. I tasted them before giving them to him and found the cookies to be pretty yummy. The chocolate flavor is mild and sweet and not bittersweet in the least. I was expecting them to be softer like traditional animal cookies but instead they are hard and crunchy.

Nutritionally these cookies are actually quite decent. They have the benefit of non-dairy calcium, which is always a concern for me since my son is off of milk products so any way I can get a little extra calcium into him is a good thing. These cookies also are a source of fiber because they contain both brown rice and pea flour as well as an additional 2% of psyllium (which is a source of soluble fiber). Still, even though they are better than many cookies out there in terms of nutritional value, I feel that they still fall into the category of a sugary snack and not something I would choose to feed my child on a daily basis.

I would absolutely buy these cookies again and swallow the fact that the box is quite small and costs $4. As long as my son doesn't have free reign to the box and I portion them out just 4 or 5 cookies at a time we've been able to keep a box for several weeks before running out. I've also been pleased that they didn't go stale in my pantry with the inner bag simply folded over and the box shut. If I'm spending this kind of money on snacks the last thing I want is to have to toss the box out before the product is consumed.

All in all, I have to say these cookies have proved to be a hit here. I think next time we might try the Vanilla flavor for a change of pace though the chocolate have proved to be quite a winner.

Recommended: Yes