Creative & Easy Food Gift Ideas

If you enjoy cooking, then you probably enjoy giving food gifts to friend and family. Christmas time is the main time I give food gifts. I bake ever year and have piles of goodies to give away to family and friends who live nearby. This wasn’t a tradition that my family had, but rather something I learned from my grandmother-in-law and my mother-in-law.

But beyond these plates of cookies at Christmas time, I have other food gifts I like to give and I have packaged them up in a broad variety of ways. Most of the time, I’m as frugal and as resourceful as possible. I guess I would rather to spend the extra money on my ingredients rather than the packaging. But there is still a lot of cute and creative ways to package food gifts without spending a lot of money.

As you know, one of my favorite stores to shop at is Smart & Final. I cruise through the food packaging aisles and often think about the cool ways their products can be used for food gifts. So, recently when I was asked if I had ideas to share related to packaging and kitchen items as part of their #FirstStreetGrand campaign, I jumped at the chance!

Here are a some of my creative and easy food gift packaging ideas:

There is nothing better than homemade, freshly baked cookies! This food gift idea uses a product you might not think of when it comes to creative food gift packaging. In the photo below you will see a First Street Loaf Pan. This one is the 1 1/2lb size.

The bottom part is an aluminum container and then there is a foil board lid. These are inexpensive too – this package from with 3 pans and lids and I only paid $1.79. It probably doesn’t look at that creative, right?

Well, that’s before I got busy in Photoshop. I used a ruler and measured the lids and create a design with those dimensions with digital scrapbooking products. I printed out the design and then cut it so it would fit the lid. If you aren’t a digital scrapbooker or you don’t use Photoshop, you could also do something similar with scrapbook paper or even gift wrap.

I turned the foil board lid over so the white (non-foil) side was facing up and applied glue to it.

I placed the back of my design on top of the glue and pressed and smoothed it down securely. I let it dry for a bit and it was done and ready to be used.

I neatly placed some parchment paper into the foil container to line it and then added my baked cookies. I was able to get 6 cookies into this container.

I placed my lid on top of the cookies and folded the foil edges down onto the lid to secure it and now it is ready to give.

Smart & Final sells these really cool First Street food storage containers. They are air-tight and plastic, and they come in a variety of sizes (some bigger and smaller than the one in my photo). What I love about these containers is that they are very inexpensive, so using them for gift giving is perfect. My container only cost $2.39. You can fill them with almost anything – candies, cookies, snack mix – the possibilities are endless.

One idea is to fill the container with a dry mix, such as a brownie mix. You could either make your own mixture or buy it in bulk, such as what I bought at Smart & Final. One big bag of the brownie mix is enough to fill a few of these containers (depending on the size you buy).

After you fill the container with your mix, be sure to attached a tag with the instructions. I filled my container with enough mix for two 8×8″ batches of brownies. I created a gift tag in Photoshop using digital scrapbooking supplies, printed it, cut it out, and tied it on with coordinating ribbons.

This next idea is very frugal and it also reuses a Starbucks paper bag (you could use any paper bag if you don’t have a Starbucks bag). First, it starts with making a quick bread in a First Street Loaf Pan such as the one in my photo above. When I give bread for gifts, I like to bake them in these disposable pans and keep them in the same pan for gift giving. These pans are inexpensive too – costing only $1.49 for 3 pans at my local Smart & Final. I made a pumpkin bread, but you could make any bread that you like.

After the bread has baked and completely cooled, I wrapped the bread up in plastic wrap.

 

Using scalloped decorative edged scissors, I cut the top and the bottom off of my Starbucks bag, so that I would have just the middle portion. Cut open this middle part so that you have one big rectangle of paper bag.

I flipped the paper bag over and wrapped it around my pumpkin bread, with the Starbucks label and design on the inside. I secured it closed by applying a glue stick to the end.

After securing the paper bag around the bread, I tied on some raffia and it’s ready for gift giving!

Here’s how to put together a fun little hot chocolate gift for kids. I’ve decided to go with a Halloween theme with my hot chocolate gift cup, but you could make these to fit any theme. I used First Street Plastic Food Wrap to wrap up some mini marshmallows and secured the plastic wrap with a bit of kitchen twine. I also used First Streeet 8oz Hot Cups and individual packets of hot chocolate.

I placed the hot chocolate package and the mini marshmallows into one of the foam cups. In Photoshop, I created a Happy Halloween tag with digital scrapbooking supplies. I printed it and cut it out and then using some ribbon, I tied the tag onto the cup while wrapping the entire cup up in some black mesh.

Want even more ideas?

Cookie Dough Logs are very easy to make with your favorite cookie dough. Learn how to make this food gift idea here:  Easy Homemade Gift – Cookie Dough Log

I also have a cute and frugal DIY cupcake holders that you are going to love! To find out how to make my cupcake holder idea, visit my post: Easy DIY Cupcake Holders

I hope you enjoyed my ideas as much as I enjoyed putting them together. I have even more creative food gift ideas that I plan to share with you in the future, so be sure to stayed tuned.

Note: This project has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for #collectivebias. All opinions are my 100% my own.