Keto Snacks at Walmart. And Only 16 of Them Are Recommended by the Experts.

Experts picked up keto snacks in Walmart, checked lists of ingredients, and here is their verdict: of more than 50 foods, only 16 are worth buying if you are on a low-carb diet.

Ok, you googled “buy keto snacks at Walmart” and want to know which ones are delicious and most suitable for the keto diet. You’ll get it. But let me ask first: why do you need a snack? Do you really need a snack? Everything depends on these answers. Let’s dive into this topic, and I’ll show you the best snack to buy and what you would prefer to avoid.

Don’t mess up snacks and desserts.

Table of content:

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I’m a keto coach, and I’ve been following the keto diet for 10 years. I went to Walmart and checked all the aisles to find what I personally would buy if I urgently needed a snack. But let me explain first.

Is snacking good or bad for you?

Many studies suggest that eating frequently is bad for your health and that eating 1-3 meals per day is optimal and often beneficial for health and wellbeing (1, 2).

“A regular meal schedule was absolutely unrealistic for our In the last 100 years, we went from long fasting periods to snacking every few hours. Eating frequency is a habit and social convention, but not a physiological need,” says Julia Bogdanova, nutritionist (NANP) and founder of @Spinach&Buckwheat.

Julia Kiltina, MD, dietitian and general practitioner, agrees that you should avoid snacking if it’s just a habit. “Even the healthiest snack on the planet Earth would be harmful in case of emotional eating,” she says. According to our expert, there are just a few situations when snaking is good for you.

3 reasons to snack

  1. You aren’t keto adapted yet. At the very beginning of the keto diet, when your body adjusts to the new fuel, you may get hungry more often than usual, and it’s ok to have something in between meals.
  2. You have a medical condition such as hypothyroidism, gallstone disease, or a removed gall bladder.
  3. There are objective reasons why you can’t have a full meal; for example, you have a day full of meetings without breaks, or you are traveling.

Summary: In most cases, you don’t need to snack whether you are on the keto diet or not.

What can you snack on when you’re on keto?

Ok, this is the most important question, and this is why my MD experts and I have chosen just 16 snacks at Walmart. Snacks are not something special. In any situation, you need food. Pretty simple, ah?

Mac's Pork skin and Epic pork rinds
Mac’s Pork Skin and Epic Pork Rinds are chips that are ok on keto.

“If you don’t have time to eat, I would recommend pork rinds – they are a nutritionally dense food, with protein and fat and nothing else. It’s the same story with meat jerky. Cheese is my number three. But personally, I prefer pork rinds,” says Maria Dogonova, MD, endocrinologist.

There is a story that in Scandinavian countries, governments banned the “keto” label on butter, sour cream, bacon, etc. It’s like creating a label for “normal food”. Everybody knows what food is and what a surrogate is.

Some keto snacks at Walmart are not so keto
If you see starch, maltodextrin, or glutamate in keto snacks, avoid them.

Summary: In any situation, always look for food. Food is something where you don’t need to look at a list of ingredients, like an egg, meat, or cheese. It’s not totally true. Anyway, look at the list of ingredients. You won’t believe how creative producers can be by adding sugar everywhere.

Snacks with keto or low-carb labels

Let’s start in Walmart’s health section and see if there are any keto snacks for us.

Here you can find butter cups, bars, fat bombs, cookies, gummy candies, etc. from the following brands (more than 30 items in total):

  • Equate
  • SlimFast
  • Atkins
  • Kiss My Keto
  • Quest
Always checks lists of ingredients on keto snack
Always check lists of ingredients; don’t trust labels and brand names. For example, some Atkins snacks are keto-friendly, while others contain sucralose, soy, etc. Even if it’s low in carbs, you’d better avoid such things.

Is this food? Nope. You won’t get good whole animal protein and healthy fats from this stuff. All these snacks are sweet, even though they’re low-carb and with some good sweeteners. A sweet craving might indicate you made some mistakes on keto.

If you want us to find your mistakes,

The second problem with these snacks is that you need to be very advanced in label reading to find a healthy option. Some products contain sucralose (I don’t recommend it to my clients), others – sunflower oil (we avoid vegetable oils on the keto diet). Even sugar and maltodextrin may be in keto bars and cookies.

Summary: There is no food in the health aisle. But some of these products could be eaten as desserts. Leave a comment if you want me to make a post about it. 

Snacks in the fridge

I can’t resist sharing. One blogger suggested buying a bag of frozen chopped avocados as a snack. I want to see it! This plot could be even better than an episode of Sex and the City, where Carrie Bradshaw and Burger discuss a man who brings uneatable fruits and veggies to a courtroom.

Cheese is a healthy snack
In those cheeses, only cultured milk, salt, enzymes, and some colors or peppers are used. It’s ok to have this food on keto. If you see starch, maltodextrin, or dextrose in cheese, then it’s not a cheese.

It’s very reasonable to search for food in the fridge. But not at Walmart. For sure, the choice may be different from store to store, but in general, the situation is very sad for low-carbers.

I’ve found only cheese without sugar. All hams, sausages, and salamis were not suitable for the keto diet.

Snacks in grocery aisles

Holly Guacamole! Finally, some food!

In the jerky section, you can find Tillamook – sugar-free jerky and smoked sausages. And… It tastes so good!

Look for keto snacks in Walmart at jerky section, not in a fridge
Look for keto snacks in Walmart in the jerky section, not in the fridge.

Nuts and nut butter are not the best choices for keto snacks because they are quite high in carbs. I would recommend eating them as a dessert after a full meal. But we haven’t found much at Walmart, so let it be.

Nuts in Walmart are mostly roasted on vegetable oils, not good.
Nuts and nut butters are good desserts. They can be eaten as snacks, but they are not perfect.

Attention: many of the nuts and butters in to-go packs are roasted in some oils we don’t use on the keto diet. I like Wonderful Salted Pistachios (but not salt and pepper, ​​sugar and dextrose detected), Blue Diamond Almond Whole Natural (raw).

I’ve found 2 to-go packs with butter at Walmart and both are not ideal. Split is a pack divided into 2 parts. Of course, you can throw away the jelly. But throw out the food, even carbs? Nah.

You can even find keto bread in Walmart. But it contains too much gluten.
Do you really need a snack or bread on keto? Nope. It’s a habit, not a necessity.

MaraNatha and Barney Almond Butter are almond butters with palm oil. Even though palm oil is ok for keto by itself, I still have too many questions. Is it added to butter? Why? Roasted in it? Not the best choice.

Yay! Keto heaven – a shelf with pork rinds and chicken chips. Yes to Mac’s Original Pork Cracklings and Epic Pork Rids and Chips.

There is a big aisle of pork rinds at Walmart
Why do they add sugars and glutamate and spoil amazing keto snacks (crying)?

All other brands were fired because of sugar, maltodextrin, and glutamate. I love Epic Chips, but I should be honest: it’s for people with good teeth.

Unexpected! Some good options are found in the canned food section. One liiiiiittle inconvenience – it’s hard to eat without a fork. But let’s pretend you always have one with you. In this case, you could have Lindsay Sliced Black Olives or Pearls Olives to go.

Keto snacks at Walmart – olives
Olives are a good keto snack.

StarKist EVOO Wild Tuna (in extra virgin olive oil) is in a sachet bag, so you could try to open it just at the conner and try to squeeze it. I think Sprit and StarKist should make a collaboration – to-go pack almond-tuna. I would buy it. As always, check the list of ingredients: there are many other fish in packets with sugar, maltodextrin, and vegetable oils.

Fork! Guys, I found a fork! Chicken of the Sea makes small plastic containers with forks with tuna inside. And I don’t know how it works, but they add sugar in sachets with salmon, but in cans with tuna – don’t.

Tuna with olive oil
Protein plus healthy fats. What could be better?

It’s time for brave decisions! When we say snack, we usually think about something chewable, but you can drink a snack! A broth or stock. In my experience, cold beef broth is something very special, but chicken broth is good cold and warm. Great Value Chicken Broth and Swanson cooking stock have decent ingredients. Caution: I don’t know whether it’s tasty or not. If you try it, give me feedback.

Keto bread often gets on lists of keto snacks to buy, but, honestly, I don’t believe it’s a good idea. Even if it’s low-carb, it still contains a lot of gluten, and the list of ingredients usually looks like a spell, sometimes a curse. The example that came to mind first was the Oroweat Keto Bread from Walmart.

100% chocolate could be a fat bomb alternative of snacks in Walmart
Chocolate is always the answer (especially when there isn’t any meat around).

A decision to buy 100% unsweetened chocolate could also be made when you need to buy a snack that is easy to eat on the go. I found at Walmart Bakers’ Bar (don’t look at the “baking” label, chocolate is always chocolate) and Lindt Excellence 100% Cacao. I love Lily’s Chocolate dearly, and if there was a dark chocolate bar, I would add it to my list. But at my Walmart, it was only milk chocolate. 

Summary: It’s not easy, but not impossible, to buy a snack at Walmart. Always check the list of ingredients. Look for the shortest lists with words you don’t need to google.

Keto snacks at Walmart: my choice

  1. Tillamook Sugar-Free Jerky
  2. Tillamook Smoked Sausages
  3. Epic Pork Rids
  4. Epic Chicken Chips
  5. Mac’s Original Pork Cracklings 
  6. Chicken of the Sea Tuna Lemon&Thyme
  7. Chicken of the Sea Tuna Herb&Spices
  8. StarKist EVOO Wild Tuna
  9. Lindsay Sliced Black Olives
  10. Pearls Olives
  11. Great Value Chicken Broth
  12. Swanson Cooking Stock
  13. Bakers’ Baking Bar
  14. Lindt Excellence 100% Cacao
  15. Blue Diamond Almond Whole Natural
  16. Wonderful Salted Pistachios 

Remember, manufacturers often change the ingredients. It only takes a second to check if they added sugar to a product.

Easy recipe for a snack to go

keto cheese chips

Keto Cheese Chips

Perfect keto snack
Pin Recipe
Prep Time: 1 minute
Cook Time: 40 minutes
Course: Appetizer, Snack
Cuisine: Ketogenic
Keyword: carnivore, chips, no eggs, on a budget
Servings: 2
Carbohydrates: 0.2g

Ingredients

  • 150 g hard cheese (Cheddar, Gouda or Emmental)
  • 10 g butter (for greasing the pan)

Instructions

  • Put some baking paper on a baking sheet and grease it with some butter, for example, ghee.
  • Bake for 40 minutes at 130–140°C (250–275°F), then remove and cool on a baking sheet.

Nutrition

Serving: 1serving | Calories: 273kcal | Carbohydrates: 0.2g | Protein: 18g | Fat: 23g

How to get rid of constant hunger? Try our health coaching. Take a quiz, and you will get a piece of advice for free!

Sources:
1. Meal Frequency and Timing Are Associated with Changes in Body Mass Index in Adventist Health Study 2
2. Differential Effects of One Meal per Day in the Evening on Metabolic Health and Physical Performance in Lean Individuals.

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