Get ready to sprinkle a little spookiness into your kid’s school day with our ghoulishly good Halloween lunch ideas! We’ve conjured up some fang-tastic, yet super simple, recipes that’ll have your little monsters eagerly digging into their fun Halloween lunches.
No tricks here, just treats! From creepy-cute sandwiches to bewitching bento boxes, these easy Halloween lunch ideas are a snap to make. We’re talking less than five minutes of hands-on time for each lunch! So, let’s get those lunch boxes ready for a haunted lunchtime adventure.
The Ultimate Guide to Healthy School Lunches
We’ve packed (pun intended!) all our knowledge from years of making school lunches into one digital master guide!
What are some easy ideas for making Halloween school lunches?
Before we show you our creations, let’s talk about some general ideas to spookify a school lunch. You don’t have to go “all in” to make a school lunch special. Here are a few ideas that will add some flair in a flash:
- Use a Halloween-themed cookie cutter to shape sandwiches or slices of cheese into ghosts, pumpkins, or bats.
- Throw in some candy eyes with fruit, veggies, or other sides.
- Focus on the colors of the season—use orange, black, purple, or green foods for a colorful twist.
- Include some Halloween-themed treats like gummy worms, Reese’s pumpkins, or candy corn.
- Make up a batch of homemade Halloween Chex Mix, Halloween Puppy Chow, or Monster Munch to add to school lunches.
- Keep it simple with store-bought snacks in Halloween packaging—we’ve seen Babybels, pretzels, crackers, and cookies all in special Halloween packaging at the store.
- The fastest idea of all? Use one of our printable Halloween lunch notes!
Give me some easy Halloween lunch inspiration!
Alright, we took the time to snap photos of some of the school lunches we made during spooky season, and here we’ll share them with you—and show you how to make each one! Let’s get going.
Halloween Lunch Ideas
Frankenstein Monster Wrap Lunch
These wraps look cute and creepy, plus they are SO easy to make! Just grab some spinach tortillas and fill with your kiddo’s favorite sandwich fixings—we used cream cheese, baby spinach, and turkey slices in ours. Fold the tortilla into a rectangle-shaped wrap. Make the Frankenstein face features using seaweed snacks and sliced veggies. If your child is old enough to have a lunch with toothpicks, create the “bolts” on the side of the wrap using toothpicks and cheddar cheese cubes. We paired our green wrap with an all-green theme, including green grapes, pea snacks, and some Halloween-themed candy.
All Black Spooky Lunch
One of the easiest ways to create a lunch on a theme is to go for all one color—this lunch took all of two minutes to pull together! We like using a snacking tray bento for this style of lunch. You can do this using any Halloween color theme—purple, green, orange—but we really enjoy the spooky and moody look of all-black. In our all-black lunch, we included seasoned black beans, Oreos, black grapes, blue tortilla chips, seaweed snacks, and black olives. Some other options to include would be blackberries, blueberries, black licorice, wild rice (you could mix it with the black beans!), figs, and purple carrots.
Protip: Spider rings make it spooky!
Low on time? Stash a bag of plastic spider rings with your lunch packing supplies. For $2 for a bag, you’d be surprised at how easily you can spookifiy a school lunch!
Halloween English Muffin Pizza
Looking for a make-ahead school lunch idea for Halloween? This one is for you! Make English Muffin Pizzas by spreading pizza sauce on English muffin halves, topping with cheese, and using olives to make spiders on top for a creepy, crawly pizza. Bake at 400°F for 8-10 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and browning. These pizzas stash in the freezer or fridge for quite a while, making them easy to grab-and-go on busy school mornings. Our kids like eating these pizzas straight out of the lunchbox—no need to reheat!
Protip: Grab and go!
You can freeze these pizzas individually and pop them into a lunchbox frozen. By lunchtime, the pizza should be thawed and ready to enjoy!
Veggie Hummus Pinwheels
Make our Veggie Pinwheels into a Halloween version by sticking to all-orange! We used sun-dried tomato tortillas, orange veggies, and orange hummus (roasted red pepper hummus or pumpkin hummus would both work). We included other orange foods on the side: carrot sticks, a clementine pumpkin, and cheddar cheese cubes on Halloween-themed picks. We found these adorable peanut butter chocolate candy eyeballs at our local supermarket.
Protip: Make a clementine pumpkin!
This is such a simple Halloween lunch idea! To make a clementine pumpkin, peel a clementine, then stick a 1/2″ piece of celery in the opening at the top to make the stem—hello, 10-second pumpkin!
Halloween Sandwich
Using a Halloween-themed cookie cutter is one of the easiest ways to add some flair to a lunch. We used a pumpkin cookie cutter and then cut pieces of red bell pepper to turn it into a jack-o-lantern, but any spook cookie cutter would work! We don’t love making cookie-cutter sandwiches for every day because it generates a decent amount of food waste. But for a special occasion? It’s a blast—and you can snack on the scraps for breakfast!
Monster Face Apples
These silly apple snacks make us giggle every time we see them! They are a breeze to make. Just quarter and core your kiddo’s favorite kind of apple. Use a sharp knife to cut out a mouth shape on the peel of each quarter and fill with peanut butter (or sun butter if your school is nut-free). Stick pepitas or sunflower seeds in the peanut butter to make funky teeth, then a strawberry slice in the peanut butter as a tongue. Using a dab of peanut butter, finish off the face by adding big candy eyes to the top of the apple.
Hot Dog Mummies
These mummified hot dogs are another make-ahead option for lunch boxes! Grab a roll of crescent roll dough and unroll the dough onto a cutting board. Using a pizza cutter, cut thin strips (between 1/4″ and 1/2″) of the dough. Wrap the strips around hot dogs or other sausages to make them look like mummies. Bake in a 375°F oven until the dough is golden brown. Add eyeballs either with two small dots of mustard or by adding small candy eyes. Kids can enjoy these at lunchbox temperature dipped in ketchup or mustard!
Protip: Make a Babybel jack-o-lantern!
Another easy idea is to make a jack-o-lantern Babybel! Using a (clean!) Xacto knife or small pairing knife, cut through the wax to make a jack-o-lantern face. Easy!
