All-natural coffee creamers are super easy to make and can help you clean up your coffee so that it’s a healthy habit and not a junky one. Coffee, by itself, is considered a health food by most experts. Once you get the hang of healthy, homemade coffee creamer, you’ll never go back!
Store-Bought Creamers
Let’s talk about store-bought coffee creamers. Their main offenses? A lot of sugar and additives! The average liquid coffee creamer contains partially hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors and sweeteners among other not-so-appetizing additives. The first ingredient of the dry creamers is often corn syrup solids. You get the idea!
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The typical store-bought creamer contains 5 grams of sugar per serving. A serving is just 1TB. If you use 2-4 servings, which is not hard to do, you could be getting up to 20 grams of sugar in your morning coffee. That is almost the entire daily allotted sugar recommendation for a woman, Eek!
Some of the more natural options have slightly cleaner ingredients but still contain the same amount of sugar. Unless you have your coffee as a dessert, it’s a good idea to cut most if not all sugar from your coffee creamer.
I drink coffee as part of my morning routine, so I don’t really want it to be sweet, but I’ll share some sweet ideas for those who like it that way! There are some zero sugar options out there, but sometimes those can contain even more questionable ingredients, and they just don’t taste great IMHO.
Easy Recipes for All-Natural Homemade Coffee Creamers
- Canned Lite Coconut milk + vanilla + cinnamon (full-fat canned coconut milk will clump)
- Coconut milk/Oat milk/Almond milk + vanilla + cinnamon
- Half & half/Whipping Cream + vanilla + cinnamon
The first option is my personal favorite. Full-fat coconut milk is just fine to use, but it clumps and hardens making it a little more difficult to work with. The last option is probably the tastiest if you can tolerate dairy. These recipes all work great in hot coffee or iced coffee.
Healthy Homemade Coffee Creamer Lightly Sweetened
Canned coconut milk adds a hint of sweetness (without sugar), but to make any of these options sweeter you can add maple syrup or honey. Keep in mind maple syrup contains 12 grams or sugar per TB and honey contains 17 grams per TB.
While these are nutrient-dense sugars, they are still sugars so use as little as possible to satisfy your taste buds. If you are trying to quit sugar, you can gradually work your way down each week. Pure cane sugar is also an option if you don’t like the taste of maple syrup or honey.
Additional Spice Options
The options are endless! Any warm and cozy spice works well in coffee. Some to try might be cardamom, allspice, cloves, ginger, nutmeg or pumpkin pie spice depending on what flavor you are going for.
Make Homemade Creamer Ahead
If you have a hectic schedule, you can make these creamers ahead and store them in mason jars rather than getting all of the ingredients out each time you want to make coffee. You will want to give the jar a swish before using to redistribute the ingredients.
My go-to jars for storing liquids are Ball Mason Jars. The only downside is that mason jars typically come with cheap aluminum lids that will rust. You can order stainless steel lids to use in place of the aluminum ones.
The ones I have come with a silicone insert that fits inside the lid to make them leak proof. They are marketed as lead/cadmium and BPA free, but are made in China and not by a brand I know and trust. They were the best option I have been able to find. Feel free to enlighten me, if you know of something better!
In a Pinch?
A few weeks ago, I needed to buy creamer for an event at my kids’ school. The PTO was having a coffee bar for the teachers and staff. I wanted to help out with this awesome idea but wasn’t going to walk in with my mason jar of my homemade creamer (maybe you are that brave—I am not!).
I went to the grocery store and after a quick scan, settled on SO Delicious coconut creamer. Even though, I was in a bit of a hurry that day, I remember noticing that it had a fairly short list of ingredients and slightly less sugar than the others (3 grams of sugar per serving).
Nut Pods would have been another o.k. choice. It’s also non-dairy and is actually unsweetened. Some of the flavors can have up to 9 ingredients. Both of these are pretty decent options if you ever have to grab something in a rush. As for store-bought dairy creamers,
I have only seen one option with less than five grams of sugar per serving and that’s Chobani. It has 4 grams of sugar … hey, 1 gram less is 1 gram less. The others that are available near me seem to be fully sweetened.
If you use store-bought creamer, I encourage you to try some of these homemade creamer options and let me know what you think! Also feel free to share any healthy homemade coffee creamer recipes that you may have. If you are doing a full coffee makeover, be sure to check out my post on why to use a Chemex or French Press.
