Review Time
Solid starts helps take the extra stress out of starting solids. I love that I am able to enter a food in the search bar and it’s tells me from which age it’s safe and how to serve it to my baby. Also love the recipes for different meal ideas. I recommend solid starts to all my mom friends who ask🙂
The app functionality is not user friendly and there are a lot of bugs, including latency issues and other problems with content loading. It’s very difficult to add multiple foods to the tracker and you cannot easily edit your entries. I wish that the foods were personalized or listed by what my baby recently ate or frequently eats, instead of some random static list. I also wish that I could create my own custom “meals” and add those to her daily tracker instead of manually adding individual ingredients, which takes too long. The list of foods and spices to choose from is also limited. I pay for a subscription and I cannot share or save articles, which is disappointing as I have multiple caregivers I’d love to share these resources with. There’s so much room for improvement, I could go on and on.
The app contains lots of very useful information when starting solids. The design is really nice and it's mostly easy to use. However I have found that it can be a bit rigid in terms of how one can input information, and sometimes it doesn't feel very intuitive. Realistically, I am not able to use it every time I feed my baby, and I sometimes like to log foods in bulk - for example, at the end of the week. This works out mostly okay, however, the way to log allergens can be a bit clunky and if you are way past the stage where you've already introduced an allergen safely, it seems you can't get rid of the "allergen series" for a particular food even after logging it a bunch of times.I have also found that sometimes the interface can get a bit glitchy (I use a Google Pixel 7). Sometimes I am unable to tap some buttons because they overlap with my phone's lower bar menu.
The Solid Starts app has many great features, especially the food preparation guidelines and allergy risk descriptions. I also found the food log helpful for a time, as my child has a large amount of allergies. I liked being able to look back for their doctor and see when they had reactions. However, food logging is exceptionally cumbersome, especially if you are trying to log multiple foods at once. As my child got older and I would try to log multiple foods at a time, the app would glitch and crash so often that I gave up and only logged foods when they had a reaction. This is frustrating given the food log is a part of the paid subscription and the cost of said subscription. The internal clock of the app was not tied to my location. As a result, when logging foods, the app would sometimes attribute foods to the next day.*This section is very specific to children with multiple food allergies, including FPIES and uncommon allergens*Their treatment of allergies could definitely be improved. Our child was high risk for food allergies and tested positive for many allergens before ingesting them. I know Solid Starts cautions against the false positives of allergy tests and recommends oral introduction, but the severity was high enough that our doctor recommended against introduction. There is nowhere to mark that the allergen was discovered via test, so I had to mark that they ate the food, which throws off the food count and badges. I asked about this on a social media Q&A, and I received a generic message that directed to a broken link. The guided recipes will not exclude recipes that contain a known allergen when you have marked a reaction outside of their introduction protocol. I manually discarded each recipe that contained one of my child’s allergens (many uncommon or FPIES-related, so they weren’t introduced via the app’s introduction series). Some recipes include recommended replacements, but when you mark the recipe as done, you have to go into the tracker, remove the unused ingredient, and add the substituted ingredient. There is also no way to filter recipes by your child’s specific allergens if they are outside of FPIES triggers or top 8 allergens.Many of the food allergy introduction series recipes include common FPIES triggers served alongside the allergen, which could be confusing to parents if their child vomits. Did they react to the allergen or the FPIES trigger it was served with? Another review mentioned that you cannot see the next recipe in an allergen introduction series in order to plan, which I also found a tad annoying.This final point is small but frustrating as a food allergy parent. During the guided recipes, if you delay or try to discard the allergen introduction series, it pops up asking if you’re sure and cautioning you against it. I completely understand the purpose, but there is also nowhere to include why you are discarding the recipe or mark that you already know your child is allergic.I know so much work goes into creating an incredible resource like this, and I know they are committed to improving. It is just frustrating to have so many issues with such an expensive product. I truly appreciate all the work, and know there are likely app programming limitations that we as users don’t understand.
I love all of the resources and materials, but they can be hard to access on the app versus on the webpage. Some of the food log pathways have extra steps that do not always make sense, i.e. you click the calendar date and then the food and then have to change the date again.
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Solid Starts is the world’s first comprehensive platform for how to introduce real food to babies. Led by a team of pediatric feeding therapists, board-certified pediatricians, registered dietitians and pediatric allergists, the platform features their award-winning First Foods® database and app, step-by-step instructions and how-to videos for introducing solid food to babies. See more
