Available now for pre-order!
The Picky Eater Playbook
From TEDx speaker Katie Kimball, The Picky Eater Playbook shows parents that picky eating isn’t really about the food. Instead of sneaking in veggies, you’ll learn how to shape the dinnertime environment so your child moves from fear to curiosity and builds a healthy long-term relationship with eating. Packed with real-life stories, flexible strategies, and step-by-step routines, it turns dinner from a power struggle into something the whole family can enjoy.
Available now for pre-order!
The Picky Eater Playbook
From TEDx speaker Katie Kimball, The Picky Eater Playbook shows parents that picky eating isn’t really about the food. Instead of sneaking in veggies, you’ll learn how to shape the dinnertime environment so your child moves from fear to curiosity and builds a healthy long-term relationship with eating. Packed with real-life stories, flexible strategies, and step-by-step routines, it turns dinner from a power struggle into something the whole family can enjoy.
Available at your favorite retailers:
Pre-order Bonuses Through November 17th:
After you pre-order at any of the above retailers, enter your order details here, and I’ll send you some free bonuses coming very soon! The book publishes November 10th, and sales before that date + the first week are very meaningful for the book’s success and will help these simple strategies reach more families who need them!
Requesting the book from your local library counts too! Just enter the library name below.
[Katie] combines culinary expertise with down-to-earth parenting advice in this no-nonsense manual to raising confident, curious eaters. She recommends creating consistent routines, like starting meals with vegetables, to help kids cultivate healthy habits. She also includes playful approaches [and] encourages parents to include children in shopping, preparing, and cooking to build curiosity. Kimball is a helpful and creative guide. Parents of young kids will find this an encouraging resource.
Praise for The Picky Eater Playbook
From pediatricians, psychologists, chefs, and parents who read it early.
As the mom of three neurodivergent children whose past battles with food preferences are the stuff of family legend, Kimball’s Picky Eater Playbook is a breath of fresh air. Kimball’s approach minimizes shame and maximizes autonomy through its emphasis on neutrality and action-based praise. In Kimball’s playbook, a child’s food choices aren’t good or bad; they’re simply in progress, growing as the family—and child—grows. It’s a message all parents of neurodivergent children need to hear, especially when food preferences are a matter of contention. Kimball’s wisdom is a mealtime gift.
Ginny Kochis, founder of Quirky Catholic Kids, author of Quirky Catholic Kids: Navigating Neurodivergence with Faith and Joy
Most of the parents that I work with experience so much anxiety around meals and feeding their children. Katie’s simple and practical strategies reduce stress in the short term and lead to healthy habits in the long term!
Rachel Bailey, Parenting Specialist
This is the picky eating book parents (and pediatricians) have been waiting for. Katie Kimball gets to the root cause of picky eating, which is not just about the food, and offers a compassionate, practical roadmap to reduce mealtime stress, build food confidence, and help our children develop a healthy relationship with food that lasts.
Elisa Song, MD, integrative pediatrician and author of Healthy Kids, Happy Kids
For years, I’ve referred parents to Katie Kimball for her practical, effective approach to picky eating. The Picky Eater Playbook respects the child, empowers the parent, and takes the drama out of mealtimes. It shows families how to create lasting change at the dinner table, one meal at a time.
Amy McCready, author of The “Me, Me, Me” Epidemic
Parents will finish this book feeling lighter, calmer, and far more hopeful about mealtimes. Katie’s voice is warm, funny, and incredibly practical.
Michele Borba, Ed.D., educational psychologist, author of Thrivers: The Surprising Reasons Why Some Kids Struggle and Others Shine
As a pediatrician, I know how stressful picky eating can be for families. This book is a must-read for parents tired of negotiating over broccoli and surviving on chicken nuggets. I highly recommend this practical resource for building healthier eating habits. The Picky Eater Playbook helps parents take a deep breath, reset the table, and move forward with confidence.
Joel “Gator” Warsh, MD, MSc, integrative pediatrician
As a chef and former picky eater, I know kids don’t learn to enjoy new foods through pressure or shame. Katie Kimball’s The Picky Eater Playbook gives families a practical path toward calmer meals and more confident eaters.
Chef James Barry, CEO & Founder of Pluck
The Picky Eater Playbook gives practical and research-backed strategies to help promote healthy eating in families. Katie Kimball is the best kind of content expert—one who knows her stuff AND understands how to guide implementation in real life. I will definitely be recommending this book to families in my clinic!
Mary Wilde, MD, pediatrician
About the book
Say goodbye to picky eating power struggles in this step-by-step guide from TEDx sensation Katie Kimball that shows parents how to move their kids from fear to curiosity about food, building long-term healthy eating habits.
What if someone told you picky eating isn’t about the food? Where others might tell you to sneak veggies past your picky eater, Katie Kimball teaches that your child is just learning to eat and that the right dinnertime environment can help your child build a healthy relationship with eating.
The surprising side effect? Less stress for both adults and kids, making dinner a win for the whole family.
But because your family is unique, you need a solution that’s adaptable but strategic, gives clear direction yet doesn’t stress you out, and cares for the long-term relationship your child has with food-not just the vegetable they get past their lips today.
Expanding on the revolutionary TEDx talk from Katie Kimball, who is the voice of healthy kids cooking, The Picky Eater Playbook is packed with actionable strategies, real-life stories, and adaptations for every picky eating challenge. Step by step you can see results in just weeks-or at your own pace.
You’ll feel confident with new routines that crush negative stereotypes and take dinner from picky to peaceful, and your child will build the right attitudes, habits, and expectations to change fear of food into curiosity.
Meet the author
Katie Kimball, CSME, founder of Raising Healthy Families, and CEO of Kitchen Stewardship®, LLC, is passionate about connecting families around healthy food. As a trusted educator and author of 8 real food cookbooks and 2 video cooking courses for kids and teens, she’s been featured on media outlets like ABC, NBC and First for Women magazine and contributes periodically on the FOX Network.
Questions About The Picky Eater Playbook
Parents of preschoolers and elementary-aged kids who are tired of dinner being a fight. The routines help with toddlers too, and plenty of them work with teens, but I don’t cover early feeding or the teen years specifically.
If you’ve got an “average” picky eater and you want practical steps instead of theory, this is for you.
The sweet spot is about 2 to 12. I wrote it for preschoolers and elementary kids, and the routines are a big help with toddlers. Teens can benefit too, because the whole approach is about the environment at the table, not tricking a kid into eating broccoli.
The Picky Eater Playbook releases November 10, 2026. Pre-orders ship from your retailer on or around release day, so ordering now means it lands on your doorstep the week it comes out.
Anywhere books are sold. Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop are linked above, and your local bookstore can order it for you.
Asking your library to carry it counts too, and it still gets you the pre-order bonuses.
A Kindle edition is available now. There’s no audiobook yet, but I’ll let you know if that changes.
One heads up: if you’d like to help this book hit a bestseller list, pre-order the print version. Kindle sales don’t count toward that push.
The No More Picky Eating Challenge is the free five-day starting point. The book is the whole system in one place: 30 chapters of strategies, real family stories, and step-by-step routines you can dog-ear and come back to for years.
The P.E.P. Club is the hands-on version, with lessons, on-demand Q&A with me, and a community for when you want coaching and not just a book. You can do the challenge, read the book, and join the club when you want some extra backup.
Pre-order from any retailer, or request the book from your local library, then enter your order details in the form above. That’s it. I’ll email your bonuses to you.
The foundations in the book help every kid, and parents of kids with ADHD, autism, and sensory challenges tell me the low-pressure routines are exactly what their kids needed.
That said, extreme picky eating and ARFID are a different battle. The book will help, but I wouldn’t promise a full turnaround without a feeding therapist on your team.
Stop asking them to eat it. Seriously. Every time a new food shows up on the table, gets passed, gets served, or even gets pushed around a plate, that’s an exposure, and exposures are what fill the bucket. Some kids need ten. Some need 107.
Your job is to keep the food showing up without pressure. The book calls this the Exposure Bucket, and part 4 is full of ways to fill it.
No, not the way most of us were raised. “One bite and then dessert” asks a kid to eat, and eating is their job, not yours.
In the book I teach the Experience Bite instead. The food goes on the plate, they can smell it, touch it, even lick it, and they never have to swallow. Give them any two-part choice about it and the power struggle mostly disappears.
Aim for Team One Meal: everyone eats the same dinner. Make sure at least two parts of the meal are safe foods for every person at the table, and serve new things as small Experience Bites so you’re not tossing plates of food.
Short-order cooking every night teaches kids that a better option is always coming. One meal, a couple of safe foods, and a lot less stress.