Bobbie promised American parents something they couldn’t find at CVS or Target: a “European style” formula, closer in recipe to what mamans and Mütter were serving in Lyon and Berlin. In 2018, Modi left Airbnb to start Bobbie, named after the word her daughter used for her bottle.

“Infant formula is one of the last remaining industries where we haven’t seen some level of disruption. So why is it that I’m buying the same boomer brands that existed 40, 50 years ago?” Modi told me recently, after recounting her well-worn founder origin story. “We know science has evolved we know consumer taste has evolved. Her comrades elsewhere were already optimizing breast pumps and outfitting bassinets with “smart technology.” They had even invented Soylent, a formula for adult babies.īut no one had touched the $4 billion domestic market for infant formula, which had been dominated for decades by just three large corporations. Luckily for Modi, she was struck by two other powerful feelings: “a mother’s intuition that there had to be a better option” and a disruptor’s nose for an opportunity. Modi says she was so embarrassed by the can of Similac she bought that she hid it in the back of her cabinet. In the harsh fluorescent glare of a late-night drugstore aisle, Modi came face-to-face with the emotion that dominates much of 21st-century parenting: the feeling that no matter how much you are doing for your baby, it is never enough. Feeding her child a can full of powdered ingredients she would never buy for herself felt like a betrayal. And some of them used corn syrup? Forget about it. The formula was packaged in primary colors and had a list of multisyllabic ingredients on the back: cholecalciferol, cyanocobalamin. The cans on the shelf didn’t look like the kinds of products that parents like Modi - millennial, coastal, Whole Foods shoppers - were used to buying. She was fighting off a fever, her daughter was screaming, and she couldn’t kick the feeling that she had somehow failed.

Like three out of four new parents, Modi was going to have to use formula to keep her infant fed.Īs Modi paced the aisle of a pharmacy in San Francisco, where she worked as Airbnb’s director of hospitality, the decision didn’t feel so simple. But Modi was struggling to produce milk and dealing with mastitis, a painful breast-tissue inflammation that can lead to infection - just two of the many medical, professional, and societal obstacles that can make breastfeeding impossible. Modi had just given birth to her first child, a girl, and she was attempting to breastfeed, in part because she wanted to and in part because the American Academy of Pediatrics encouraged it. One night in 2016, Laura Modi was facing an acute episode of an eternal parenting problem: trying to get your infant to eat.

The Baby Matrix by Laura Carroll