Introducing Sesame to Your Baby: Tahini and a 14-Day Plan

Sesame is the newest of the nine major allergens the US requires on food labels. The FASTER Act added it, and labelling became mandatory on 1 January 2023. That recency is exactly why we skipped it for so long. The baby books we were reading predated it, and every checklist we found opened with peanut, egg and dairy.

It is not new anywhere else. Sesame sits on the EU list of 14 and on the Australian and New Zealand list as well, so wherever you are shopping, it is a declared allergen. We had never given it a slot. If you want the full nine as a reference, we wrote them up in the FDA 9 post.

Tahini is ground sesame seeds and it behaves like peanut butter: thick, sticky, and a genuine choking risk offered by the spoonful. NHS guidance on foods to avoid makes the same point about whole nuts and seeds and nut pastes generally: offer them thinned or mixed into something the baby already eats, never as a blob on its own. Whole sesame seeds sprinkled on a bagel are a similar problem at this age.

What worked for us was stirring a small amount of smooth tahini into a purée our baby had eaten many times without any trouble, or into plain full-fat yoghurt. Warm the tahini slightly and it loosens. We aimed for something that looked like the purée it started as, just a shade beige, with no ribbons of paste left in it. Hummus made with tahini worked later on, once the texture was no longer an issue.

We used the same rhythm as peanut and egg. Day 1: a pea-sized amount of tahini thinned into a familiar purée, in the morning, then a wait of 15 to 20 minutes before offering any more. Day 3: half a teaspoon, same method. Day 7: a full teaspoon, or a smear of hummus if the texture was going down well. Day 14: sesame as an ordinary part of a meal.

The rule we held to was one new allergen at a time. No other first foods went into the rotation during those two weeks, because a rash on day nine is useless information if three new things went in that week. We wrote down what was offered, when, and anything we noticed afterwards. Mostly we noticed nothing, which is the ordinary outcome and still worth having on paper. Why the window matters is covered in the delayed reaction post.

This is the part that caught us out after the introduction was over. Sesame turns up on ingredient lists under names that do not contain the word sesame: tahini, benne or benne seed, gingelly or til oil, sesamol and sesamolina, and halvah. It is also a standard component of za'atar, dukkah, and a lot of bread and cracker toppings.

The 2023 US labelling change helps here, because sesame now has to be named as sesame even when it is buried inside a spice mix or a flavouring rather than listed separately. Packaging printed before that change was allowed to stay on shelves, though, and imported products follow their own country's rules. We got into the habit of reading the list rather than trusting the front of the packet. If your baby does react, those alternative names are the ones worth learning properly, because they are where accidental exposures come from.

ASCIA puts solid food at around 6 months of age and not before 4 months, once a baby shows signs of readiness, and lists sesame among the common allergens to introduce in the first year. The AAP sets the same timing. Both say allergens are then kept in the diet regularly rather than offered once and forgotten. The EAT study (Perkin, 2016) included sesame as one of its six early-introduction foods, which is part of why it appears on modern lists at all. We summarised the guidance itself in our ASCIA post.

Our paediatrician was clear that babies with severe eczema or an already diagnosed food allergy get a tailored plan, sometimes with testing first, and that this is a conversation to have before starting rather than after. There is also a practical reason not to let sesame lapse: unlike egg or dairy, most children do not outgrow a sesame allergy. Hummus once a fortnight became our way of keeping it going.