Crocodile Creek Drinking Bottle Review

The Crocodile Creek kid's bottle is an eco-friendly, stainless steel bottle. It is made with #304 stainless steel that is lead safe, and phthalate and BPA free. It holds 13.5 ounces of liquid and is recommended for ages 3 years and up. The bottle has an easy to use plastic lid that helps keep the drinking spout clean. Some of the bottles come in a variety of bright and colorful patterns, and therefore they should be hand washed. This bottle is 100% recyclable, has a slim design, and fits in most cup holders.

Performance Comparison

Likes

We like that his bottle is made of food grade stainless steel and is electropolished so it is easy to clean and doesn't have any edges for gunk to collect. We prefer steel to plastic because it is an inert material that doesn't leach or impart flavor to its contents.

We also liked the super fun graphics on these bottles that managed to draw kids

in without being the traditional trademarked characters from popular television shows, comics, or movies. It is nice to see kids playing with bottles that have all the planets in the solar system on them than a talking race car. Some of the little users even asked questions about the planets and where they were (education and hydration, score!).

This bottle has a narrow slim design and is lightweight compared to the other stainless steel options in this review. This made the bottle easier to pick up and hold for little hands, and it scored well in this metric. It also comes with an attached lid to keep the mouthpiece free of dirt and debris.

Dislikes

This bottle leaked; it received the second lowest collective score in our tests for leaking. It leaked upside down and sideways with the lid off and spout open. While it might prevent leaks better with the spout closed and the lid on,

many of the other bottles in our review managed the leak tests without difficulty even with their spouts wide open. This made the Crocodile seem like a real disappointment when lined up side by side with the other contenders.

This bottle is also hard to drink from. The sport type spout doesn't have a regular flow rate and some children had difficulty drinking without closing the spout at the same time when they pressed it to their lips. In general, it seemed more difficult that should be necessary for a kids bottle, and over time the frustration grew for some kids, resulting in the lack of use of the bottle.

Even thought this bottle has a small number of parts, the mouthpiece design is a little bit of a challenge to clean properly, and we found it was best to use a straw brush to get in the crevices even though it doesn't actually have a straw. we also sort of wish the mouthpiece didn't require that little hands to open it for use, this potentially creates a dirty spout for drinking that was clean prior to being pulled open.

Conclusion

This is such a fun looking stainless steel bottle that we really wanted to like it, and most of the in-house little testers did like it. It brings together some of the attributes we find favorable when looking for possible water bottles for kids. It is eco-healthy, has a nice lid, and isn't too expensive. Unfortunately the excessive leaking and the hard to use spout make it a bottle that failed to meet our expectations and didn't match the competition in testing. This makes the Crocodile a bottle we don't recommend, even if we say that with a bit of a heavy heart.