This a fantastic, kid-friendly and kid-pleasing idea that I seriously wanted to love, but just couldn't. We had two sets, these and the
Lunch Punch Animal Shape Sandwich Cutters (Set of 4)
and found neither REALLY worked as designed, rarely cleaning cutting any sandwich we tried it on and, if you use anything other than Wonder Bread (i.e. anything natural, organic or whole wheat), the cutters will be incorrectly sized to your sandwich bread, thus missing a good bit of the design.
In this set, the airplane was a dismal, useless failure and we discarded it pretty quickly, since it made nothing but a mess. The other three--car, train and truck--all *kind* of worked, but were also problematic. The main issue is that cutter isn't sharp or crisp enough to actually cleanly slice a sandwich, so you're mostly denting, then ripping and tearing the bread, rather than slicing through it. Also, the shapes, which look so cute on the cutter, come out ragged and smashed, and thus end up mostly unrecognizable. And the smaller bits--wheels, windshields, etc.--just end up looking like lumps of nothing. Unappetizing and useless, smashed bits of bread.
They work best on simple things like PB&J and are pretty much wasted on anything else (tuna salad or lunch meat), because even a tiny bit of filling trips these cutters up even more. I also tried just cutting the bread and then assembling the sandwich from the cut pieces, and the results were pretty similar, if slightly better. Still, even then, the small bits couldn't be successfully extracted. (And, even if they could, making a 1/2" sandwich so you'd have wheels after they were already cut, would be pretty difficult.)
The idea of turning my son's school lunch into a puzzle shape, to help encourage him to eat, even when I'm not around, is a dynamite one--in theory. In reality, a sharp cookie cutter and a single shape is far more practical and likely to create a recognizable shape/character. Which is why these have been sitting in a drawer gathering dust for the better part of a year, and are now headed to Goodwill.
Will be looking for a metal set of punches as this one melts. True I might want to wait until after I take a grilled cheese sandwich out of the skillet to punch it, but if the plastic melts in this application, there's no telling what chemical residue is left on child's food after cutting a hot sandwich. Landfill here we come...
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