Allergy-Free Easter and Passover Candy Online

by Kelley Lindberg


My crocuses are blooming in the front yard, the birds are singing in the morning, we’ve set our clocks forward an hour so that the evenings are suddenly feeling longer…Spring is coming! Of course, in Utah, that still means spring is about two months away. But it’s coming, slowly but surely!

Another sign of spring is all the Easter merchandise in the stores. Easter is on April 8 this year, and Passover begins the evening of April 6, so you have less than four weeks to do your candy shopping. That means it’s time for my annual Easter Candy Roundup!

This week, I’ll focus on online sources for allergy-safe Easter and Passover candy, because if you need to order your candy online, you’ll want to order it soon. Next week I’ll look at the candy you might find in local stores.

Several great online manufacturers and grocers offer allergy-friendly chocolates and candies for every holiday and just about every type of allergy. Especially if your family must avoid multiple allergens, these online suppliers might be your best bet.

• Amanda’s Own Confections: They offer a whole line of chocolate goodies for Easter and Passover, as well as jelly beans and other candies, all dairy-free, peanut-free, nut-free, egg-free, and gluten-free. Their Happy Easter Bunny Box is a tiny 4-oz. box of 11 pieces of chocolate shaped like bunnies, chicks, and ducks, and it’s only $5.95. Their Passover Lollypop is only $2.25. (Deadline for Easter orders is March 27th.) If you’re looking for Passover candy, they state: “All of our products (chocolate and non-chocolate) are Kosher certified. Our facility is not certified as of yet, however, we are working on the certification process.” 

• Chocolate Emporium: Read the ingredients carefully on this website, but they do offer a lot of non-dairy chocolate items for Easter, and a huge selection of non-dairy Purim and Passover candy. They have bunnies in different flavors and colors, including chocolate, butterscotch, white, and strawberry, as well as foil-covered chocolate eggs. All of their products are dairy-free, and many are nut-free, egg-free, and gluten-free, but it’s a good idea to call before you order to ensure you get what you need, allergen-wise. Regarding kosher products, their website states: “All chocolates produced by Chocolate Emporium are Kosher Pareve under Star-K supervision.” (Easter orders must be placed by March 23.)

• Vermont Nut Free: Their chocolates are peanut-free and nut-free, but they do have milk and egg warnings on them. Check out their chocolate bunnies, caramel bunnies, buttercream bunnies, chocolate lambs, Easter fudge, chocolate eggs, and chocolate crosses. (Their chocolate is not kosher.)

• Divvies: Peanut-free, nut-free, dairy-free, and egg-free chocolate bunnies, and jelly beans. (They don’t mention whether their products are kosher.)

• Yummy Earth: Yummy Earth candies (lollipops, gummy bears, sour beans, sour worms) are corn-free, as well as being free from the big 8, and they use natural colorings and flavorings. They’re available on the Yummy Earth website, in health food stores, and from Amazon.com. (Certified Kof-K kosher parve.)

• Indie Candy: Check out the cute crystal sugar egg-shaped lollipops and Key-Lime flavored carrot-shaped lollipops on this site (no dyes or common allergens at all!). They also have bunny-shaped gummies, and allergen-free European dark chocolate bunnies! They have a large selection of confections in a rainbow of flavors, like mango and watermelon, and you can search by your specific allergy needs. If you’re looking for kosher candy, their website states: “Indie Candy is currently pursuing Kosher and Organic Certification. Currently the ingredients used fall within Kosher and Organic guidelines, but we have not completed the facility certification process.”

• Peanut Free Planet: This site sells candy from lots of different manufacturers, including Vermont Nut Free and Amanda’s Own. You’ll find chocolate, jelly beans, and all sorts of allergy-friendly groceries.

• Oriental Trading Co.: Remember, Easter eggs and Easter baskets don’t have to be filled with candy. Oriental Trading Company offers a bazillion (I counted them) little novelty toys that fit inside Easter eggs or into Easter baskets, and you can buy them by the dozen or more. And for the ultimate in time-saving, you can even buy plastic eggs pre-filled with little toys. Now THAT’s a helpful Easter Bunny.

Hoppy shopping!

Are Food Allergies Kosher?

When you first learn that you or someone in your family has food allergies, grocery shopping suddenly becomes a much bigger challenge than you ever expected. Shopping trips take twice as long because you’re standing in the aisle reading every label. You’re rethinking all those recipes you’ve made for years. You’re dreaming up new ways to cook.

It’s overwhelming at first. Unless you are freakishly well-adjusted (and don’t talk to me if you are because I don’t want to know) you will go through every one of those infamous “five steps of grieving” – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Eventually (believe it or not), we all make it to that fifth step, acceptance. We are creatures of habit, so we simply begin to make new ones. After a while, we learn how to shop again. We rebuild a little repertoire of quick dinner recipes. We slowly restock our pantry with a new selection of snacks. We fall into a lunch routine. Grocery shopping becomes an ordinary activity with no-brainer purchases again.

So it’s really interesting when a new wrinkle gets tossed into the routine.

Last week, my oldest friend – wait, “oldest” is wrong (she’s a year younger than me)…I’d better start over. My “longest-enduring” friend came to visit me! We met in junior high school when I lived in Maryland. That was more decades ago than I really want to say out loud. Just before twelfth grade, I moved to Utah.

Despite the miles, we’ve stayed best friends, even though we’ve only seen each other in person once in the last eighteen years or so. So when a convention finally brought her out west last week, she finagled a 36-hour detour to Utah to come see me. It was wonderful, as if no years had passed – we picked up right where we left off, and never paused for a breath (so my husband says).

What made this quick visit a little more interesting is that in the decades since she last stayed with me, she began keeping kosher and I had a son with food allergies.

Some Jewish people keep kosher at sort of a nominal level. Others, like my friend, keep very strict kosher. It’s not possible to explain all the details of kosher cooking, but suffice it to say, I’m not Jewish so my kitchen isn’t even nominally kosher. Therefore, I can’t use my dishes, pans, utensils, or stove. So right away I know I’m going to have trouble feeding her, and I haven’t even set foot in a grocery store yet.

I called around to find out if Utah has a kosher restaurant. We don’t. We have a kosher caterer, but it was less than convenient and very expensive. More searching revealed a grocery store in Salt Lake City that actually has kosher sections marked. I went there and walked around. The good news was, I saw lots of kosher choices! The bad news was, it all needed to be cooked, and I didn’t know how we were going to do that if I couldn’t use my stove, oven, or grill. Our choices were going to be pretty limited. Then I picked up several packages and started reading labels to see if any of the kosher snacks and treats were nut-free. They weren’t.

Oy.

After about five packages, I got discouraged and went home. It felt like the old days, when I first learned I had to eliminate nuts from our food and it suddenly seemed like every single food item in the store was contaminated. I had almost forgotten that feeling. Now here I was, right back in “food is the enemy” territory again.

My friend had assured me that if came right down to it, she could survive on an apple and cottage cheese. But I wasn’t sure any of the cottage cheese in Utah would be kosher. I hoped my friend REALLY liked apples.

I picked her up at the airport and drove her directly to the grocery store with the kosher sections. She calmed me down and told me how we could clean and purify my microwave to make it kosher, or how if we really needed to, we could double-wrap a kosher pizza in aluminum foil to heat it in my oven. She showed me how to interpret the little kosher symbols. She found pretzels that were nut-free. We bought apples. We found kosher cottage cheese. We bought carrots and Cheerios and milk and bagels, all of it kosher, and all of it nut-free. We ate off paper plates and used plastic forks, and even discovered one sweet treat that both she and my son could share – Oreos.

Then the really amazing discovery -- we found a package of kosher Ramen noodles that appears to be egg-fee and milk-free, which will be great news for my son's best friend!

For both me and my friend, shopping for our own needs has become second-nature. Adding in the wrinkle of each other’s food issues ratcheted up the challenge, but we managed to work together to solve even that.

I have new-found respect for people with food allergies who also must keep kosher (or any other type of special diet). But human beings are pretty amazing. As overwhelming as it must seem at first, we all have to play the hand we’re dealt, so if that were my lot in life, I suppose I’d eventually get to the point where grocery shopping once again became a habit, and food became a routine instead of an enemy.

Thanks to my calm and unflappable best friend, I learned two things this week. Upping the challenge every once in a while is a good reminder to appreciate how far you’ve already come. And sometimes tackling new challenges brings rewards you weren’t expecting… like a simple little package of Ramen noodles.