Healthy Snacks at Target for Kids (Updated 2026)

Target is where a lot of families do the whole run — groceries, diapers, a birthday gift, and the week's lunchbox snacks — in one loop of the store. For low-added-sugar snacking that's a real advantage, because Target carries the widest assortment on this list: its own Good & Gather store brand plus a deep bench of the national better-for-you brands, all in one place. This page is the honest shortlist — the Target snacks we track at 3g of added sugar per serving or less, sorted lowest-sugar first — so you can fill the cart without reading forty nutrition panels. Many of the same national brands appear at the warehouse scale in our healthy snacks at Costco list if you prefer buying in bulk.

Here's the landscape. Across the 311 Target-stocked snacks we track from these brands, the average is 1.0g of added sugar per serving, and 2% carry more than 5g. Target's snack aisle is enormous, and a big chunk of it is the sweet stuff — the cookies, the sweetened yogurt tubes, the fruit snacks, the character-branded granola bars aimed squarely at kids. The highest-sugar item in this pool is Larabar Cocoa Cashew Clusters at 11g per serving. The snacks below are the low end: 68 at the strict sugar-free bar, 147 at a confirmed zero added sugar, and 29 at 3g or under.

On method, briefly: every product we track gets a sugar tier from A to E based only on the Added Sugars line of the Nutrition Facts panel — not on the "organic," "natural," or "made with real fruit" language on the front. Tier A is under 0.5g total sugar (the FDA sugar-free bar), Tier B is label-confirmed 0g added sugar, Tier C is 3g or less. Tiers D and E (5g and up) are the dessert-shaped snacks, left off this list on purpose. Everything below is Tier A, B, or C.

Target has two real strengths for a low-sugar cart. The first is Good & Gather, Target's own store brand, which carries a solid set of low- and no-added-sugar snacks — veggie straws, plain and lightly-salted crackers, applesauce, cheese, and dried and freeze-dried fruit — often at a lower price than the national brands next to it, and available at essentially every Target. The second strength is breadth of national brands: Chomps meat sticks (protein, 0g added sugar), That's It fruit bars (fruit only), MadeGood granola minis, Simple Mills crackers, Siete grain-free chips, Annie's cheddar bunnies, GoGo squeeZ pouches, Cerebelly and Serenity Kids for the toddler set, Hippeas chickpea puffs, Pirate's Booty, Sensible Portions veggie straws, and — in the refrigerated aisle — Siggi's and Stonyfield for lower-sugar yogurt. That combination of a good house brand plus wide national distribution is why Target is often the single easiest big-box store to build a low-added-sugar snack cart in.

The honest caveats. First, availability varies by store and by region even at Target — a smaller-format Target may carry a slimmer assortment than a SuperTarget, and specific SKUs rotate, so treat the national-brand picks as "commonly stocked, worth looking for" rather than guaranteed. The Good & Gather items are the most reliably present. Second, Target's snack aisle is designed to sell the sweet stuff — the kid-marketed granola bars, yogurt tubes, and fruit snacks are front-and-center and heavily branded, so the Added Sugars line is your filter, not the cartoon on the box. Third, "organic" and "made with real fruit" regulate growing practices and marketing, not sugar; read the Added Sugars line first and treat organic as a secondary filter.

A few practical notes. As everywhere, the savory and protein side — meat sticks, cheese, crackers, veggie straws, chickpea puffs, plain popcorn — is almost always the lower-sugar end, while the sweet lane is where the added sugar climbs. In the refrigerated aisle, buy plain or low-sugar yogurt (Siggi's, Stonyfield, plain Good & Gather) and sweeten at home with fresh fruit rather than buying pre-sweetened tubes. For fruit, the fruit-only bars, pouches, and freeze-dried fruit beat the sweetened fruit snacks. And for kids under 2 — the US Dietary Guidelines window for zero added sugar — narrow to the Tier A and B items here: meat sticks, plain puffs and crackers, fruit-only pouches, and plain yogurt all fit.

A pairing habit helps here too, and Target makes it easy because the produce and refrigerated sections are right there in the same trip. A serving of Good & Gather veggie straws or Chomps plus a clementine and a cheese stick is a snack that actually holds a kid; a lone granola bar rarely does. Grab the fresh half of the snack — bagged apples, clementines, baby carrots, cheese sticks, plain yogurt to sweeten at home — on the same loop through the store, and portion the packaged snacks into small reusable containers so a "healthy" big bag doesn't quietly become an all-day one.

Below is every Target-stocked snack in our database at 3g added sugar or less, sorted by added sugar ascending. Stock and price vary by store and week, so use this as your "grab these brands" guide. Start the lunchbox run here.