Best Halloween School Lunch Ideas for Kids

Updated on October 21st, with more Halloween lunch ideas.

I love holidays and I love food, so it is only natural that school lunches get a Halloween twist around the month of October. We try to do themed packed lunches year round, but figured it would be fun to share some of the simple ideas we have used to make our packed lunches more spooky for this time of year. Hopefully you find some ideas you might like to implement in a packed lunch!

Spooky Eggs

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We do spooky eggs two ways in our house! As some of the lunches normally contain deviled eggs (already spooky, just read the name) it’s easy to spook them up a bit more. If your child likes hardboiled eggs, you can do the same to them without turning them into proper deviled eggs. What you can do is hard boil the eggs, then crack the shell but do not peel it. Then, place the cracked eggs into a glass of water with black or green food dye over night. In the morning, when you peel the eggs, you will have crackles all over them, creating a spooky webbed effect. We call these alien or spider eggs. If you are doing the full deviled eggs, you can add green food dye into the mix, making them spooky green eggs.

Mummy Wrap Mains

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One thing the children really enjoy in their lunches is mummy wrapped items. You can purchase some pre-made crescent roll dough, and use that to roll around any types of meats. We’ve done mummy hot dogs, mummy sausage rolls and mummy meat balls! It’s a really simple way to make anything you are serving as a main spooky, especially as it takes just one extra ingredient and not very much effort as you cut the dough into strips and wrap it around the outside of the meats before baking them in the oven.

Pumpkin Everything

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When it comes to Halloween, Pumpkins are very well known as a Halloween favorite. We make everything we can into pumpkins! You can easily cut faces out of BabyBell cheese or draw faces on oranges using a marker. We even have a giant pumpkin cookie cutter to cut sandwiches or wraps into a pumpkin shape, which you can then layer triangles of cheese onto to make eyes. If you pack soups as a lunch – or if your children like carrots – you can cut carrots into pumpkin shapes by cutting two, parallel lines down the carrot, then cutting another line at an angle on either side, creating a pumpkin shape when you then cut them up.

Monster wraps

Monster wraps and monster bagels are two staples when it comes to easier lunches to make. You just need to make a normal wrap, and then cut some cheese out for hair and add some eyes. These are hummus and chicken wraps, with cucumber, and we cut olives to be the eyes. If your child doesn’t like olives, you can always use red pepper and cut them into eyes! We also make monster bagels, as another sandwich alternative, which are your favorite bagels with eye sprinkles. You can see spooky bagels and other lunches on my TikTok!

Black Pasta

At most specialty stores, you can pick up black pasta made out of black beans or squid ink. We have found the black bean pasta to be more affordable and easy to find. Black pasta is spooky – and it’s pretty easy to make. We have heated up black pasta in red pasta sauce with sausages, added it to soups, and even just done simple pesto pasta dishes with the black pasta, but because it’s black, kids do think it’s very spooky.

Spider Bites

If you are looking for a little side, spider bites are really fun! Most of the time, people make them with peanut butter in between two crackers, with pokey legs. However, Amelia and Robin hate peanut butter, so we make ours with spreadable cheese in the middle – cheddar works best – and pretzel sticks as the legs, so that thy match the taste of the cheese. These always go down well and are very more-ish!

Normally Spooky Items

Taking spooky colored items, like honey dew melon and adding a few sprinkles to the mix can make anything spooky. We got a pack of black and white skull sprinkles and a pack of pumpkin sprinkles which are thicker than normal sprinkles, so they don’t bleed into the fruit. Adding a few on top of any fruit or non-spooky item makes them instantly spooky – and it’s not even that much effort. We’ve even added them to candy apples – these are just fun to have this time of year.

If all else fails, don’t be afraid of food coloring. Add a drop of green to hummus, maybe a bit of red into some yoghurt, add a little story about how it is totally spooky in the morning before school and I am sure kids will be pumped.

This post is apart of our Blogtober series, all with a Halloween or Autumn theme.