The Dr. Hyman Show - How Laura Modi Is Rewriting Baby Formula

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Every parent wants to feed their baby well—but finding clarity in today’s system isn’t always easy. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, I sit down with Laura Modi, CEO and co-founder of Bobbie, to talk about the real challenges families face when it comes to feeding and why it so often feels overwhelming.  Laura shares her personal journey, the moments that changed everything, and what she’s learned from supporting thousands of parents through this stage. Enjoy the full conversation on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. In this episode, you’ll learn: • Why shame shows up so quickly around feeding—and how to replace it with clarity and confidence • How to navigate breastfeeding challenges without feeling like you’re “failing” • What most parents don’t realize about formula standards, labels, and ingredient quality • How combo feeding can ease pressure, support mental health, and support your baby’s development • Why America’s fragile formula system matters for every family and how to stay informed  Feeding your baby should feel empowering, not confusing. I hope this conversation helps you feel more confident as you navigate this stage. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman https://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal https://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Health https://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Join the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Results https://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Seed, Fatty15, Function Health, Sunlighten, PerfectAmino and AirDoctor. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 20HYMAN for 20% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Head to fatty15.com/hyman and use code HYMAN for 15% off your 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Join today at functionhealth.com/mark and use code MARK2026 to get $50 OFF toward your membership. Head over to sunlighten.com and save up to $1400 or more this holiday season with code HYMAN. Go to bodyhealth.com and use code HYMAN20 for 20% off your first order. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at airdoctorpro.com/drhyman. (0:00) Laura Modi's experience with mastitis and challenges in breastfeeding and formula feeding (1:06) FDA nutritional standards and the critique for infant formula (2:06) New mothers' dilemma: Breastfeeding vs. Formula (3:19) Hospital practices and breastfeeding discouragement (4:14) Laura Modi's transition from tech to founding Bobby (7:08) Emotional toll of formula usage on mothers (9:27) Ingredient quality in infant formula (16:01) The 2022 infant formula shortage: Causes and effects (18:39) The science of breast milk for infant health (23:46) Probiotics, microbiome, and infant health (26:35) Mimicking breast milk in formula development (27:05) US vs. European infant formula standards (28:06) Combating the stigma around formula feeding (33:55) Policy efforts to enhance infant formula standards (37:21) Ensuring safety and domestic production of infant formula (41:03) Transparency and labeling in the infant formula industry (44:06) Identifying high-quality infant formula (45:43) Government programs' role in infant formula access (48:11) SNAP challenges and infant formula (49:34) Guidance for mothers on infant feeding choices (52:46) Disrupting the infant formula market and looking ahead (55:47) Nutritional supplementation for infants: Vitamin D and probiotics (58:10) Episode wrap-up and acknowledgements

I went into motherhood grounded in all of these beliefs and expectations that my body would be able to exclusively breastfeed my babies. Five days in to having my first kid, I got my stitis and it got to the place where I wasn't able to get enough milk out to feed my child. And the alternative for me to feed my child was going to a pharmacy to buy my baby's food. And I was riddled with guilt. The formula is food. Why are we also going to a pharmacy, which is typically a place that you would go purchase drugs for a medical need? Your ability to not be able to breastfeed shouldn't be seen as a medical problem. There's been so much shame and stigma tied to how you feed your child that we have to develop a new relationship with it.

Laura Modi is the co-founder and the CEO of Bobby, the first women-led organic infant formula company driving policy and cultural change in early nutrition. Now, before founding Bobby, she spent six years at Airbnb where she led global host experience and trust initiatives. In 2025, she was named one of Times Magazine's Women of the Year for her leadership in reshaping how America feeds its babies. I started looking at the nutritional standards that the FDA had set and was questioning why hadn't they really evolved over the last 30 years? Essentially the same formula that I probably was consuming as a child was the same formula that existed on shelf for our kids. But every other food source has seen some change with the latest science. 50% of babies born in the country rely on

The way it's set up for Infant Formula is that the two major companies will bid for the winning per state, and they will be the formula of choice in that state for any WIC participants. So what that does is limits choice. I mean, frankly, I think it's a sign that inequality starts day one. How do you give advice to mothers who are trying to figure out how to navigate the space? How do they make the right choice for themselves and for their baby? Your best is best, is one of the most important things to consider. You've heard me say many times that gut health is the key to living 100 healthy years.

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today. Laura, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you. Thank you for having me. Delighted to be here. Now we're talking about a topic today that impacts millions of people that has been fraught for many reasons and problematic, which is how do you feed your baby? Breast milk formula, good, bad, how do we think about it? And what are the problems with our current situation around formula, particularly in America? As a physician, and I delivered 500 babies in my day. Wow. And I loved OB and loved, and I was a family doctor. So I took care of the mother and the baby.

So the whole way through. And I remember being in the hospital, in the, especially where I was training. And I would deliver babies and I would, I would have to put an order in the chart to not feed the baby formula unless it was under a doctor's order. Mark. And the reason I did that was. because I wanted the nurses to actually support and encourage mothers to breastfeed. Of course.

And what I was seeing happening was that they would discourage the mothers from breastfeeding. Yes. And that I wasn't happy with. And formula feeding is okay, but I'm just saying like that should be the go-to for most, we're willing to start, at least to try, right? And so I think, you know,

I think the question was always, is like, what formula should it can have? And then I always tell these kids with all these health issues from formulas and gut issues and, and allergies and eczema and, you know, the quality was terrible, and I read the labeling. It was like sugar and refined oils.

I'm like, what is this? I wouldn't feed this to my dog, you know? And so your story is quite amazing because you, you know, you were a big executive and doing cool stuff and in business and you worked Google and Airbnb and, you know, you had a big career. And then you kind of took a left turn. Pretty big left turn.

So tell us the story of like how this all came. into your ecosystem because Google and Airbnb don't seem to have much to do with formula and babies. No, nothing at all. Nothing at all. It was a hard pivot. I joke that, you know, I didn't grow up dreaming of starting a powdered milk business. It was never part of the agenda. I went into motherhood, you know, grounded in all of these beliefs and expectations that my body would be able to exclusively breastfeed my babies. I grew up in the west of Ireland. I'm the eldest. That's why you had That funny accent? Yes, it's fun.

I'm in the in-between phases. I was the eldest to five. My grandmother had 13 children. She breastfed all of them. A lot of kids, but there's something about comparing yourself in many ways to your own lineage and your community and how you've grown up. And I just saw that it was a natural thing to do. It was also something that I think was just built into the expectations of becoming a mother

in my family. So here we are. I grew up in the West of Ireland, certain expectations. and then I moved out to the U.S. and I had American babies. Five days in to having my eldest, my first kid, I got my stitis, which is a common infection. What is that just so people know what that is? Yeah, it's essentially an infection of the milk glands where your nipples can blister, they can bleed and you can get to a place where you can't produce enough milk. Now, if treated well and if given enough support, you can treat it so that your milk does come back and that you

continue to breastfeed your child. Stubborn Irish me, I just powered through. And I also reflect back, I actually think about this all the time. I didn't really have a support system to turn to. It wasn't like there was an easy access to calling up lactation consultants. And to be brutally honest, I think I probably left it too late. I mean, you just kind of powered through your working. I did, I powered through.

And it got to the place where I wasn't able to get enough milk out to feed my child. And then you're left with that. Well, then you feel terrible. Terrible. I mean, the responsibility you have to feed your child is the number of the responsibility. Exactly. I go down to the local pharmacy. And I remember standing, it's so vivid, standing in that middle aisle.

And I look on one side and you see cat food and then you see diapers. And now you're choosing what is essentially meant to be a food to feed your baby. Oh, and the worst part about it is I had to ring, you know, the shame bell, the bell that says, can you come unlock this case? because I need to get food because my body's unable to do this. And why do they have a lock like that? Because people steal the formula. It's usually related to people stealing anything expensive.

But, you know, if you actually unpack that a little bit, why are we also going to a pharmacy, which is typically a place that you would go purchase drugs for a medical need? Your ability to not be able to breastfeed shouldn't be seen as a medical problem. And unfortunately, the alternative for me to feed my child was going to a pharmacy to buy my baby's food. And that just left me with, like,

I was riddled with guilt. Everything leading up to that point I was able to accomplish in my life. I actually remember hoping that they would give me a bag that wasn't see-through so that when I walked out with that formula, I wasn't going to be judged. Wow. Such shame.

And so that inspired you to start this company, Bobby, which is trying to reinvent, infant formula. In some ways, like look at what Europe's doing and kind of come up with a hybrid that creates a better formula. And it's something for me as a physician when I was trying to find formulas to support the breastfeeding mothers that I was taking care of. It was a struggle because like, this is crap and this is crap and this is crap. And, you know, what we have now in America is a crisis of obesity. You know, 20% of kids are obese, 40% are overweight. Infants. One in 10 or even more, of infants are overweight or obese.

Wow. And this is not because they're eating too much and exercising less, right? It's not their fault. And they're not because they're eating Twinkies. Something's going on. And we talked about it earlier before the podcast, but there was a study that came out recently

that identified just how much sugar an average baby was getting in their infant formulae, and it's about a can of Coke a day. Yes. So can you talk about the implications of this for our infant population, and then the downstream long-term consequences for children and then adults who are programmed in very young ages to be overweight or obese.

Let me first start with the makeup of breast milk. So breast milk is actually made up majority of sugar. It is, you know, most of what you will get in breast milk sugar, but it's natural milk sugar. It's lactose. Exactly. And on a spectrum of all the different types of sugar, on the other end, what you commonly see or have commonly seen in formula is corn syrup. They're two totally different sugars. So while they provide the same carb output, the input is radically different. Yeah, carb is on a carb, it's on a carb. There you go.

I learned that from you. We've got to start looking at what is the best alternative to the processed ingredients that have typically been used. And what you're seeing is a rise of formula companies. And I think smaller companies like Bobby that are coming in are really pushing the mark and saying, we should be using natural milk sugar, which is why we only use 100% lactose. Sort of having a thought about, you know, the other end of the age spectrum, which is the elderly. And what often they get is like insure and boost.

And these things are just filled with corn sugar and corn syrup solids and refined oils and all kinds of horrible ingredients. And it's like we're kind of poisoning both ends. Both ends. What I want to sort of help you help us understand is, you know, what is the composition of breast milk and one of the important things that we know are important for a baby's growth and development? What actually is in most formulas now that, and what's missing. Yeah. And then what Bobby does, which is your company, is to help actually fill that gap.

Yeah. And even also, you kind of add to it a little bit by adding, you're providing baby supplements like probiotics and vitamin D. Yeah, DHA. Yeah, DHA, which is basically the main fat in breast milk. I used to joke all the time. I said, you know, the best source of omega-3 fats is wild fish and breast milk, although it's hard to get the breast milk. And every formula should have DHA. Because it's important for brain development. Yes, one of the most important things. So, okay, back up for a second.

Breast milk is made up of carbs, proteins, and fats. And infant formula needs to mimic that. But like I said, how you decide to make up those carbs, proteins, and fats can look very different. Most formulas will turn to cow's milk. And then you need to manipulate that cow's milk to mimic that of breast milk, to make it easy to digest to ensure that the baby's getting the full composition. So let's use protein. It is a mix of weight to casein protein. But what's interesting is the mix that you get in breast milk, the combination of weight to casein, is different to that of cow's milk.

So most formulas have to add in more way to make it easier to digest. And casein to me is more inflammatory and also more... gut issues and more, you know, of a cause of things like eczemae, allergies and things like that, yeah. What is not actually printed on most infant formula labels is what that ratio split is. And to sort of get the benefits of making it easier to digest for a baby, you want to see that the way to casein ratio matches that of breast milk, that is more 70-30, which is the opposite to what you see in typical cow's milk. And then we talked about sugars, and then there's also fats. So I do want to underscore infant formula does have to mirror that of breast milk for these

major macros. But it all comes down to the ingredients. Where are those ingredients coming from? How are they processed? How are they farmed? Are they organic? All of these things matter. And use grass-fed milk, right? Grass-fed milk from small batch American farms. We use expeller pressed oils for our fat blend. Not the ones that are used solvents and heat and hexane and deodorizers and decolorants. Yes, yes. And all of the things that ultimately are the negative consequences for using the wrong ingredients. So it's more than it's more than the ingredient itself. It's where is it farmed and how's it processed? And most companies are not putting that directly on a label and talking about it. I think what you're saying is so important. I want to underscore it because people think, oh, protein, fat, carbs. And if anybody's been listening to me for the last 30 years, you know what I'm going to say next, which is a food is medicine. And that not. Not all protein, not all carbs, and not all fats are the same. And they have profoundly different biological effects.

So you can have broccoli, which is a carbohydrate, very different than a can of Coke. Correct. Same carbs, same calories. If you have a big gulp, that has huge amounts of sugar. And in order to get the same amount of, you know, carbohydrate as you get in a big gulp, you have to have 35 cups of broccoli. And so you're never going to, you're never going to be able to eat that. first of all. Second of all, you can have the big gulp and get all the effects. And the sugar is high fructose corn syrup in one. And it's, you know, complex, you know, bonds of glucose in carbohydrates

plus fiber plus other stuff. So fibers are carbohydrate. So, you know, the effects on metabolically on your immune system, on your gut microbiome, they're just profoundly different. So you can't just say, well, it's got enough of the right exactly matching protein, exactly matching fat, exactly matching carb as breast milk. So it's okay. No, it's not. It depends on where they come from. So can you talk about with that perspective that the ingredients matter so much and the quality matters and the form matters and the source matters? What is different about what you created that actually creates a better and healthier formula? Well, this sort of goes back to my Irish accent, which is I started looking at the nutritional standards that the FDA

had said and was questioning why hadn't they really evolved over the last 30 years? Essentially the same formula that I probably was consuming as a child was the same formula that existed on shelf for our kids, but every other food source has seen some change with the latest science. So comparing that to, let's say, the European nutritional standards where they had evolved every four to five years. And those nutritional standards were coming out and saying, you know what, before we didn't think DHA is needed, but now the latest science is saying that it's really important for cognitive development. And not just a small amount, but a really, really healthy amount that no other U.S. formula had met.

Yeah. And it's real, 60% of your brain is DHA, is this omega-3 fatty acid. 60% of the brain fat is this fat. And it's so formative in those first thousand days. So here we have an entire continent who's come out and said, we believe that DHA is needed for babies' cognitive development. But over in the U.S., we still didn't have a standard that said formula companies are required to put it in.

Which made me crazy. Which totally, and I mean, that's another conversation. We can get there and we should be the gold standard for being able to say what infant formula looks like. But in my, in, from my perspective, I'm looking at global standards, not just the EU, but all over the world and saying, what are the world's best standards? And then why can't we also produce that here in the U.S.? Because we should be able to source from local small batch American farms. we should be able to produce it here domestically, but also look to the global nutritional standards to what's best.

And essentially, that's what I did with Bobby. So when the check engine light comes on in your car, do you ignore it? Of course not. You take it to the mechanic and fix it before it's a bigger problem. Your body's no different. It's constantly sending signals. Inflammation, blood sugar is rising, hormones are shifting. But if you don't look under the hood, you won't know what needs attention.

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body and mind will thank you. Head over to sunlighten.com and save up to $1,400 on your purchase with Code Hyman. So talk to us about the way in which the protein is different, the fat's different, and the carbohydrates. You touched on that with lactose. And then I want to kind of double-click on a few of those areas because I think it's important to people understand that, you know, right now because of the kind of sugars, for example, or maybe even the oils in infant formula, is causing an obesity crisis and an overweight crisis in infants. In infants. In infants. I mean, think about it.

Like one in ten people in America weren't overweight when I was born. Now it's one in ten babies are overweight. My God. And look, on the other side of this, hunger is still an issue too. I mean, we're still living in a place where hunger and obesity happened to be brought up in the same sentence. So I'm still living in a world post the infant formula shortage of 2022, where infant formula wasn't even being able to get found on shelf, let alone, you know, talking about the quality of it. Bottom of Maslow's hierarchy is, is it even a very? available. And the fact that we're living in a nation where the availability of an essential

goods is still very hard to get on shelf and fully stock. Send me up with me. And because we have such centralized food supply system and a few companies controlling everything that it's a monopolized system. So if it goes down, it's the whole thing's down. I mean, you remember in 2022, it was a wake-up call to America. We got to a place where one infant formula company that was feeding close to 50% of the population, they had to close their doors because of a contamination. What that did was show us we're not resilient enough. As a nation, we've allowed two companies essentially to create this dependency

that we've now had on them to feed our babies. So that Abbott and Johnson and Johnson? And, look, they have done an incredible job evolving the science and ensuring that infant formula really is meeting the standards that we need, keeping babies fed, but we've gotten to a place where that dependency on two companies to feed our nation is, there's consequences to that. And we saw that in 2022. Unfortunately, what ended up happening during that moment was we turned to another nation

to say, because we can't keep shelves stocked, we want other countries to come in and feed our babies. And they did. And they did. But here we are three years later. And we are still relying on imports. which is is not how we're going to build a sustainable and resilient America. We need to be able to invest in our next generation. So going back to the question of like the food is medicine and the formula,

so we talked about the importance of DHA and the fats. There are other fats too. I often joke when I give lectures that, you know, breast milk is a huge amount of saturated fat. It is. About 25% of the calories are saturated fat. We have such a war view of saturated fat. fat, but it's an important fat. It's a critical fat for these babies. There's certainly some in Bobby's,

but it's still hard to get that right. So can you talk about, you know, how you sort of worked around that with the fat piece? Every infant formula company is in the same position. So you need to make up the majority of your calories have to come from fat. And remember, a baby, a baby is growing 10% every week and then it continues to go, like, to a point where not providing the needed calories to that child is also,

making them deficient of their ability to develop. So a lot of your fat can come directly from the milk source, but you also need to be able to add in alternative oils. And for every infant formula globally, that's vegetable oils today, because it makes up the matching fat blend to that that you find in breast milk. And you've also got coconut oil, which is a saturated fat oil, purposely left out palm oil, which is a very commonly used oil. actually one of the leading causes to constipation as well.

So yeah, it's a mix of coconut oil, sunflower, safflower, and, you know, over time, I really do hope, and I think the U.S. can be a leading example of this. How are we leading into more natural milk fats, and then alternative oils like olive oil? And so you kind of are sort of trying to thread the needle with the fats. You have to. But you're doing things that are different,

even if using the similar name of the oil, let's say canola oil, but you aren't using ones that are industrial produced with tons of glyphosate, which is a herbicide that destroys the microbiome and has carcinogenic effects and epigenetic generational effects and just it's a problem. Yeah. You're using organic or expellerplast or cold press or things that aren't using a lot of the same industrial processing of the oil.

So the oil in themselves are not the problem. It's often how we're processing. That is a really, really important. point to underscore. There is such a polarized relationship when people hear vegetable oils or seed oils. And it's not about the ingredient itself. It truly is. How is it processed? How is it manufactured? So we use a supplier who only use coal press, expeller pressed oils. That means they're not using hexane. And it doesn't have the same negative impact and inflammation that most seed oils would have. And actually it's usually it's those kind of oils that are used in mass

processed foods. Yeah. And you also, you know, don't put in all the other weird stuff that they put in, um, formula. Like it's, it's, um, and I think you have, you know, the protein is way protein, which is, correct. Grass fed way protein. Yeah. And the, and the, uh, carbohydrates a lactose, not like, basically essentially high fructose corn syrup or some derrota of that. Yeah. And If you really zoom out for a second, formula is food, and that is something that we've taken very seriously, which is if breast milk is a natural food coming from a human body, how do we get as close as possible to developing something that is as natural as that? And one of the things, for example, something you don't put in, they put in a lot of thickeners

like carigenin, and these have been shown to cause gut disturbances. and we're seeing just an epidemic of childhood allergies, of true allergies, not just sensitivities like peanut allergy. We're seeing an explosion of things like eczema, asthma, gut issues, colic, and also as kids get older, we're seeing increasing autoimmune issues and this whole cascade of problems. And we know, for example, that these emulsifiers, which are things that kind of make things smooth,

like the formula smooth, are often a cause of a leaky gut. and damage so they've got lining. And that, that, something is they just throw in the formula. And so you're getting all these weird industrial ingredients and other things in there that aren't serving the baby. I have a, I have a general rule as a, as a formula CEO, you know, and it's hard because you're, you're in an industry where you're looking to constantly evolve and improve your product and meet the latest science.

And while I feel so deeply committed to never. compromising, I also never want to be in a position of also formula shaming. And, you know, you know, it's challenging. It's, there is, there's a lot of formulas out there that have a certain makeup and whether it's availability, affordability, access, there is room to improve and holding those two truths at the same time is really important as we continue to evolve the industry. The thing I want to sort of dive into a little bit more is about the microbiome because there's a company and you actually have this as part of the things you offer, which is a probiotic for babies. Maybe people just, I'll just sort of unpack a little bit of this and have

you sort of jump in with me. But we've seen, you know, increasing C-section rates, almost one in four births now, some of the one in three bursts. We're seeing, you know, lack of babies going through the birth canal and colonizing their microbiome. We're seeing, I mean, I give lectures all over and I always asked the question, how many of this audience have never taken an antibiotic? And like, no, literally nobody will raise their hand or occasionally like one person will raise their hand. And so everybody's taking an antibiotic, which will kill one of the most, including women or babies, one of the most important species. In your microbiome. In your microbiome, called bifidobacterm infanticum infantic. Yeah. The infantist, yeah. And this is something that colonizes the baby's gut and

prevents leaky gut, regulates immune system, prevents autoimmunity, allergies. And this is something that is fed by the prebiotic sugars in breast milk. Correct. Can you talk about the importance of that and how you're working to kind of address this in some way or you can not talk about it? Well, we're doing a lot of studies on it. It's near and dear to my heart, very near and dear to my heart.

I think looking at all of the different bifido cultures and the opportunity that formulas have to cultivate what has just been missing, the short of it is formula companies haven't gotten there. There isn't a perfect solution. And while there is probiotics that are found in formula or probiotics drops that you can add, we still haven't been able to accomplish that gap yet.

Yeah. There is a company called Avivo. Vivo. No, their bifidostrain is exactly what should be given to babies. Yeah. And it's something I recommend all pregnant women to take and for their babies take. And then when you give a baby a probiotic,

unlike adults, they'll colonize the gut. And it'll stay there as opposed to, As an adult, if you take a probiotic, you have to keep taking it in order for it to work. And there's natural prebiotics also found in lactose, which, again, another argument for using lactose over corn syrup. And then, you know, what's really interesting about this is that 15% of the carbohydrates are these sort of prebiotic fibers, sugars. Yeah, they call human milk oligal saccharides.

And like, you think, 15% of the carbohydrates, calories are from this completely unusable food for babies. They can't use it. It's for the bugs, not the babies. And that is something I'm learning today. Wow. Yeah. So that's like, wow.

Like if, you know, one in seven calories is actually not for the baby, but for the gut. From the carbohydrates, you have to put the gut. Wow. That tells you the importance of this. And so I think it's something

we have to figure out how to properly navigate with formula, but there's ways around it. There is, but I think you're highlighting something really beautiful here. The opportunities to continue to get closer and closer to breast milk, are there. And especially when I just think about the U.S. continuing to be seen and should

be seen as the gold standard of how to make infant formula, we have an opportunity to advance that innovation. Yeah. We should have other countries looking at America as the country to emulate. Totally. I mean, I think that's 100% what we're not doing, except for you. Heads down. So how do you differ from the European formulas? Well, look, we match. the European nutritional standards, but the biggest advantages were made domestically. The fundamental belief is that you should be able to get the highest quality formula with the best recipe that meets the latest science, but you shouldn't have to ship it in from overseas. Having it sit on a cargo ship and brought in, I mean, that raises all different types of questions around quality

and safety. We're spending this time talking about the nutritional aspects of it, but you break down the safety requirements of infant formula, the contaminations that you need to avoid. Baby is one of the most vulnerable audiences out there, and producing that formula domestically is where you get the perfect combo. It's amazing. Your formula is also organic. Correct.

It's non-GMO. It's locally sourced. It's like, checks a lot of the boxes, right? As it should, yes. Have you done any studies looking at the impact of babies using Bobby formula versus conventional formula? Not yet. Too early.

But, you know, we're only in our fifth year. And the goal is to just... You're a baby company. We're a baby company. We're not yet in our toddler phase. There's a lot to be done there. But, I mean, look, you mentioned this at the very beginning. It's also so much more than the baby.

It's also mom. The mother is the sole provider for a child. And as a company, we're full. focused on not just what's in the tin, but like also what's outside the tin. How do you change the conversation that surrounds feeding? How do you support mom going through this and the parent who's trying to decide what the right feeding choices are? There's been so much shame and stigma tied to how you feed your child so much that we have to develop a new relationship with it. So I take evolving our conversation and evolving the relationship that you have with how you feed

your baby just as important as the nutritional. Well, let's talk about that because, you know, you often talk about this false binary choice, but breast milk and formula. But it's the case that most of the time, women do both. Correct. So can you talk about that and the numbers behind it? Yeah. Everyone loves a binary story. It's so simple. It fits nice. You know, know, into a pamphlet, the breastfeeding pamphlet and the formula pamphlet. And the reality is that's, that's not the case. That's not how most people are actually feeding. And they're combo feeding. And this isn't just coming from me as a formula CEO. I think in a recent study, the most recent study from the CDC said that 86% of parents, 86% of babies born in 2022, were breastfed

longer than ever before since they've been doing their study. That's an amazing. Amazing accomplishment. That's huge. But here is what also followed it. They said, while breastfeeding is natural, it's not easy. And part of accomplishing the longevity of those that were breastfeeding was due to combo feeding, the introduction of formula. I'm blanking on when it actually came out, I think, a year or two ago. But what that study is essentially saying is most parents are doing both. And actually, if they do introduce formula, and they can take some of that burden or weight away from feeling like, oh, I've just given my child some formulas, so I should move exclusively to this. They might actually breastfeed longer. So it's not a binary choice. It's not a binary choice. And if you're choosing formula for your baby, you want to choose the best possible formula. Correct. We shouldn't look at it, you know, just because you can't access exclusively what is considered the best, the alternative should also be the best. It's interesting. I thought about this, and I don't really even don't barely want to

bring it up because I don't want people to kind of think that breastfeeding is bad because I don't think it's bad. But the reality is that, you know, most humans are toxic waste dumps. And it's, it always concerns me. Like I, and when you, I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group, and there was a study done, which they looked at umbilical core blood from babies before they taken their first breath, even before they breastfed, right? Okay. Wow. There were 287 known toxins in the bilical cord. Wow. Flame retardants, pesticides, glyphosate, DDT, docks,

and things that have been banned for decades, heavy metals, phthalates. I mean, the list goes on and on. I always sort of joke with somebody should come up with a breast milk filter. Wow. I don't think it's possible, but, like, it would kind of be cool, like a water filter, so you don't have to get all that. But the beautiful thing about what you're sourcing is it doesn't have any of that.

No. Well, breast milk is so personal, and it's so. so dynamic. It's so dynamic. It's like, it's dynamic in a way that nothing will ever compare, nothing. It changes from a different stages of breastfeeding, yeah. It is one of the most beautiful sources in the world. It really is. Again, I think a big part of me starting an infant formula company was because I so desperately wanted this liquid gold that I wasn't able to give my children exclusively. But what you're also highlighting is it's so personal and dynamic that it very dramatically for every single mother, for every single parent. And we don't talk about that enough.

Yeah. There's so many other environmental factors that play into the quality of how a child is fed or the choices that you actually have available to yourself. It's often seen, we're just talking with a binary piece of it, that people are choosing one path or another. What we're ignoring is most people don't have a choice. I always found it very hard, the conflict, when I was deciding how I was going to breastfeed or formula feed my next kid and realized, oh, but I don't have the paid leave to be able to do so.

So here I am, you know, with the same governmental body who says you should be exclusively breastfeeding your child for six months is also not giving you the paid leave to be able to do so. I think they give you a year opinion. I mean, Europe, it's pretty high up there. So, you know, there's a conflict and message that we're putting out there, which is really hard on a new

mother. They're already going through their own hormonal changes. They're at a place where their identity is being questioned. They don't know who they are, what their responsibilities are, and here we are giving them a conflicting message to exclusively breastfeed your child for the next 35 hours and also get back to work. That's a hard thing. So breastfeed for a year, but get back to work in 12 weeks. As quick as possible. So Laura, I want to sort of change directions a little bit. You You know, you're involved not just in, have been created another pathway for women to think about formula and mothers to feed their babies healthier options. But you're also looking at what's happening kind of at a policy level. And I know you got a lot of flack for this, but you met with Bobby Kennedy, RFK Jr.

I did. And other formula groups who are a part of this effort called Operation Stork Speed. Can you speak to what that is, why it's important, and what's going on around this in terms of the regulatory and legislative aspects? of protecting our children and improving their health? I know you have a range of people who come on. The show is a lot in the world of food, but I think the one thing to differentiate from food to infant formulas,

infant formula is heavily regulated. And in fact, it is regulated by FDA, and hence HHS. So they're, you know, going back to the meeting and sitting with, you know, the slew of other CEOs in the infant formula industry, this wasn't a question of should we or should we not be there. This is the agency who regulates our very existence to be in the market.

And secondary to that, if there's going to be a conversation around the future of the product that I milk, sweat and tears pour into this company, then you better believe I'm going to be at that table talking about how that future should look. So, you know, I think part of the distinction is there's sort of this belief of willingness and partnership when in actuality this is really a, this is a regulated industry and you have to work with the regulators. You have to be the table. So take us inside that room. What were the conversations?

And what are the other CEOs in the big form of companies like Abbott and me saying, and how are you kind of trying to change the conversation to move things in a healthier direction for infants? There's nothing more bipartisan, nonpartisan, than. what it means to be able to feed your babies. And unfortunately, the topic tends to get polarized. And it shouldn't. So like removing that from the table for a second, everyone is aligned that there should be improvements. A few callouts were around the nutritional standards. We talked about DHA. DHA should be in the formula. Iron levels should be more optimal. We should have limitations

on the use of alternative sugars. All of the things that you should expect to see on the upgrade of infant formula. The second thing we talked about was... Maybe we shouldn't have the equivalent of a can of Coke the day that the baby's consuming? Yeah, that was a huge part of what we should remove. The other thing was about resiliency. So again, back in 2022, the American president got on the news and talked about how shelves were empty and we weren't able to feed babies. So we could evolve formula all day long, but we also need to make sure it's available and affordable to the masses. There was a lot of conversations around domestic manufacturing. Why is it that two players dominate the industry? Why is it that we don't

have more manufacturing facilities to be able to turn to and rely on? I really loved, I think, that the one tension that this industry has, which is we should never be trading off availability and safety. And part of safety is making sure that it's available and a baby can be fed. So we have to look at the resiliency of the market just as much as the nutritional updating. And the solution must be a decentralized food system that has multiple channels for production and for processing and not just these couple of factories that make infant formula. The same thing happened with meat. They're like there's five meat companies in the world and they and if one of those goes down or it was a crisis. What are we going to do? Yeah. And that happened

during COVID. So again, we need to rethink our whole food system. The entire, we need to go back to what FDR did during, after the Great Depression, the New Deal era. Yeah. It's more than just saying, here's what we need to do. Now the question is, what is the private sector doing with the public sector to reform from the ground up? It's a form of relief and recovery and reform. The entire system needs to be rethought through. And I think just about manufacturing, and again, one of the most important parts of making infant formula is the safety of

producing it. I mean, the factory has to be clean and safe and good and you can't have contaminants in bad crap. I invite you to come to our facility in Ohio. We will put you in your bunny suit and we will walk you around. And it is truly one of the most beautiful things to see because the safety that goes into producing that milk, any form of contamination or bacteria that shows up has a more negative consequence than the potential maybe trade of certain ingredients. So the safety is very very important. We call ourselves somewhat test-obsessed, testing, you know, we have 2,000 quality checks for every batch, and we're not investing enough in the U.S. to do that.

And, you know, here we are importing our way out of a crisis. You fast forward to maybe the potential harm of that. What are we doing to protect the safety of formula coming in from overseas? Yeah. 5,000 miles away. That's crazy. We're an agricultural nation. We should be able to produce our baby's milk here at home.

Yeah. We prioritize computer chips and cars and steel. And here we are turning to another nation and saying, hey, we can't make good infant formula. Can you help us? Right. That's wild. Yeah. That's wild.

I hope to look back in 10 years where, again, another nation is looking at America as the gold standard and wanting to import our formula. And we have to invest in that. There's a lot of things happening around that, right? The Made in America Infant Formula Act, protect the Infinite Formula from Contamination Act to try to make safety issues. So you're involved in these kind of policy?

Yeah, we co-created the Made in America Infant Formula Act. What it essentially is, is you probably know the Chips Act, billions of dollars put aside to be able to invest in domestic chip manufacturing here in the US. This is a mimic of that, but it's a smaller amount to say, we need new infant formula manufacturers in the US. And it's not enough to just say, oh, we want to have them. There needs to be incentives. There needs to be tax breaks, production tax breaks. And then we need to be able to qualify the sort of companies that are also able to do this in a way that breaks up the concentration. It is policy work, and that policy work takes both private and public

sector working hand in hand together to make it happen. And I hope that if these if these do get past, we should see more bobbies in the world. Yeah, yeah. You know, more companies like mine and not just someone walking down the formula aisle and going, what is the, you know, formula I'm going to choose where there's only five on shelf. There should be way more. You also talk a lot about transparency. Yes.

And transparency has trust in, you know, labeling. And one of the problems that our food supply is it's not properly labeled. So people don't know what they're getting. Like, you know, if you see a pack of cigarettes in Europe, the entire. in front of the pack, says, this will kill you, don't smoke it. Like, you can't even find the brand basically on it. And, you know, that changed behavior. And so the problems in America is that we don't have good food labeling by design.

Because the food industry doesn't want us to know what's in it. And so can you talk about sort of labeling and testing and disclosures on infant formula, including things about DHA, the contaminants, you know, you shouldn't have to call the manufacturer to figure stuff out? That's wild. You know, and then, unfortunately, because there's no rules around it, what ends up happening is you see these marketing claims saying fortified width, but you don't know how much, you don't know the impact on it.

And sometimes the use of marketing claims like fortification can actually go in the opposite direction where now there's too much. And what we're beginning to see with something like iron that happens to be the case, which is actually we find that US formulas are using too much iron. Yeah, and you can get iron overload. It's not good. Iron overload, which has negative consequences for, you know, the adolescent age. So the short of it is, you shouldn't have to call the manufacturer to question what the levels are or what the specific ingredient is. DHA is another great example of this. You could put in two milligrams per 100 K-Cal and say that you have DHA.

Yeah. But window dressing. Over window dressing. But over in the EU, you need to have a minimum of 20 milligrams per 100 KCal. So. 10 times much. Exactly. So the short of it is, we need, and I think consumers, consumers are smart, parents are wicked smart.

They're doing mini PhDs when they become a parent because they want to understand every ounce of what they are giving or feeding their baby, putting on their child, and they will see it. So I think the companies that are forthcoming to that will be the companies that win. So there's still room to improve it, scientifically, right? 100%. And you all, you do, this is where you need regulations. You need regulations to come in to also say what is required for people to share. Because it is, have you ever walked down a formula aisle? Oh, God.

It is, there needs to be a little bit more joy in it. But it's all consuming. You know, from the claims, so the labels to what am I giving my child to see ingredients you've never heard of before. We need to do a better job allowing a parent to make a decision, allowing a consumer to make a decision. without feeling like they need to go back and do a deep Google search on this to make sure it's okay. How do we get there?

We've got to change some policies. We've got to enforce some rules. And I also think it's just competition, honestly. I think more and more companies that come in the market that are doing better, like Bobby, will also force the rest to catch up. Are you the only organic GMO free formula? There's a few other smaller ones,

but it's less than 5%. Less than 5% of infant formula is USDA organic. Also, that's another huge difference, Mark. The difference between saying something is organic versus USDA organic or made with organic ingredients, you know this better than anyone, radically different. Yeah, it's very confusing. A lot of smoke and mirror. So tell us what we should be looking for.

You should be looking for USDA organic. Look for the seal. There's a reason the seal exists. Because that's determined by very specific criteria and guidelines and inspections. And also, it's one of the highest in the world. which is also a false perception that has crept up over the years, which is organic means something different globally. But USDA organic here in the U.S. is one of the highest standards of organic. And hence why the availability of some of those ingredients can be quite hard, and the cost of them is also higher.

So can you scale up with having that? Working on it. Working on it. Behind the scenes, the supply chain aspect of making high quality formula is a multiple, multiple. a person's job. I'm interrupting this conversation because it's an important one. I know there's someone in your life who would connect with Laura's story, maybe a new parent, a caregiver, or someone navigating their own feeding journey. If this conversation resonates with you, please share it with them.

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So WIC is women, infants, and children. And there's some concerns about how these processes are done at a state and federal level that limit mother's choices, particularly women who are part of these programs. They often mean they're under-resourced. Oh, I remember starting Bobby and going deep into my own research. in discovering this, which is 50% of babies born in the country rely on WIC. 50% of the babies born rely on a certain formula to be fed. And how the program works, and let me just also first underscore, I think WIC is an incredible

offering. Snap is an incredible offering. The program has helped so many families in this country. The way it's set up for infant formula is that the two major companies, will bid, they will basically bid for the winning per state, and they will be the formula of choice in that state for any WIC participants. So what that does is it limits choice. Formula non-choice, you mean? Formula non-choice, exactly. So imagine now you are a parent in a certain state, you have your child, you're not given a choice. You're on WIC, you are told, here's the brand,

and here's the formula that your baby can be on it. We've just spoken about the evolution and the improvements and the quality that can happen with formula. And here we are with a formula that is not evolving, that they don't have any choice with, and this is what they're going to feed their baby. I mean, frankly, I think it's a sign that inequality starts day one, day one. Now, are there initiatives in policymaking now that are going to address this? There is a lot of questions being raised. I mean, even going back to Operation Storic Speed, we can't evolve the system without considering half of the population. Right? It's not like you're bidding on a fighter jet contract. This is like babies.

This is babies. Yes. And again, we don't want to have any, we don't want to look at the program as a negative because the program is fantastic. But, you know, Bobby has come into the industry since this has been in. We should evolve the way the requirements are written so that other companies can also be able to meet the program. We should evolve the funding. But the program itself just hasn't evolved. And what about SNAP? That's the food stamp program. Snap's slightly different. Again, another fundamental and very important program that a large percent of this population, millions. 46 million Americans rely on. And to have them wake up one day and not be able to rely on the funding that was essentially purchasing their food to feed their families and their babies. And formula is a big item that is purchased through SNAP. And so you're also adding safety concerns to that. What people then do is they look to ration the purchases that they're making and you're feeding an infant.

They need to be able to get the chloric intake. They need to be able to grow and develop. So these things are fundamental. And there should be zero compromise to what it means will want to fund them. And then also evolve the programs and reform them from the ground up. And how will we fix now? Because WIC, it seems like if we had more. choice and more availability. How would you fix

SNAP around these? One, keep it funded. Keep it funded is the number one. But then also there should be a pride and dignity in being able to go out and buy your food, right? And the fact that there's only limited choices for where you can go use those SNAP dollars also says to someone, if you have SNAP dollars, here's where you should go purchase your items or here's the brands that you can use. We have to

make it wider. So you're you've been this person, you're this mother walking down the aisle, like, how do you give advice to mothers and women who are trying to figure out how to navigate the space and what to think about, what to look for, how do they make the right choice for themselves and for their baby? Your best is best is one of the most important things to consume. The real formula in life is everything else going on around you, your support system, the medication you need to take, your own lineage, your own anatomical body's ability to do it, even your baby being able to latch or being fun, like, you name it, there's 101 factors that go into decisions that you're going to have

to make when it comes to feeding your child. Did you get paid leave? Did you not get paid leave? Surrogacy, you name it. And what we are not fully embracing is that each of the person's journey is going to be different, and your best is what's best. Your best is best. Not breast is best, but your best is best. I think that's been the message. And I still think that breast milk would be the first thing the women should try to do because from a health perspective, there's nothing like it for a baby. Totally. And so even, even a few weeks or months can make a big difference. You get colostrum, you get a lot of things that help the baby's gut health, you know, get going healthily. But consider everything else.

And if you're able to breastfeed a little bit longer because you've been able to introduce formula or your support system has changed, like, that's amazing. And the babies don't get kind of messed up, switching back and forth? It takes some work. We actually, we recently launched a service called The Feeding Room,

which is like my second baby. Because it is the support system, right? And I remember with my first few kids, if I needed breastfeeding help, I had to call a lactation consultant. If I needed formula help, it was on Reddit at two in the morning going deep into the subreddits trying to figure out what to use. There was no holistic place to turn to.

And that also leads to the stigma as well when you think it has this binary path of where to get help. And you don't know where to go. You don't know where to go. So being able to turn to something, I mean, we provide hundreds of folks who've come to us where we're literally just providing lactation help, flange sizes, pumping schedules. And to be in a world where you are able to figure out what is your feeding plan, what is your feeding goal versus how do I fit into this path or this ideology that has been put on me is what we need to evolve to. And that's empowering women and not feel shame or guilt or bad about what they're meaning to do.

And then actually providing choices that they can feel good about. Exactly. Like the formula you created, which I personally wouldn't feel good about feeding my grandkid or baby if I had to do another one infant form. as it is now, with the industrial processing that it has, I just would not. But that doesn't mean that there aren't good choices and alternatives. And I think that's kind of where we're hopefully leading. And hopefully you'll push the market,

because that's often what happens. Markets need to be pushed. Yeah, and you're a big disruptor, and you're disrupting the formula market in a beautiful way. And I think, I'd love some of you to maybe just think about projecting out, you know, five years, 10 years. Where do you sell this going and what is going to be available? Because, you know, how do we create something as close to approximate as breast milk as possible without compromising?

More studies, more innovation. And like I said, I think the U.S. has an opportunity to be leading the path in this. We have incredible scientists and researchers out there that are going deep into the microbiome, to cognitive development, to the impact of certain ingredients. Or the ability to make and mimic certain features that are in breast, breast milk that are maybe non-synthetic. So I hope that in the next 10 years, we can just continue to creep closer and closer and closer to the dynamic nature of breast milk. And while we do that, my secondary goal is that we also reduce the guilt and the shame

and we stop projecting our own opinions and our personal experiences. People get judgy. We've got to lower the judgment, lower the judgment, lower the bullying. let's allow people to be their best and also treat them as smart individuals to make their own choices. So yeah, culture needs to change along with the product.

So in 10 years, when we have this conversation again, the gut microbiome will be better and the conversation will have changed. I think that's a huge one. I think the microbiome is this a big unlock if we can figure that out. And I wonder if there's part of what I often think, you know, for mothers,

I've certainly come to take the probiotics and you've created a probiotic, and I want to talk about that. But also, you know, pre-biotics. So maybe you can't put it directly in the formula. There's prebiotics in formula. Yeah, there are. Is there in Bobby's formula?

We've natural prebiotics. So we test it and it comes through in the lactose. Again, push 100% lactose. Interesting. Because there's, you know, the oligocaccharides that come from milk that are a little different than that, but it's, yeah, it's interesting. And I think, you know.

The study of HMOs is a really, really fascinating space. And HMO is human milk. All I go saccharide, not health maintenance organizations. Yeah, that's right. That is the other. HMO is like, it's face like Kaiser. This is a problem because, like I said earlier, you know, even if you breastfeed, you know, a lot of, a lot of times the mother doesn't have the right bacteria that it passed on to its baby. And so the baby is already starting out a deficit.

So there's ways to sort of correct that problem we've created because of our overuse of antibiotics and because of the increased C-section rates and because of the various kinds of other things that are. going on that caused these sort of epidemic of chronic disease in children. I mean, that's sort of what was highlighted with the make America healthy when they, you know, I'm looking at the children and this first commissioner report was really, let's focus on the children. And it was kind of shocking to see, you know, how our kids are at the effect of so much what we're doing. And that doesn't need to continue. And your work is just helping shift that. Tell me about the vitamin D and the probiotics that you've also created and why. Many parents will go to the doctor. Everyone like has this flashback. They go to the doctor and the doctor says that your child needs more vitamin D drops.

Actually, what's really interesting is you typically need more vitamin D if your baby is exclusively breastfed, then you do if they are exclusively formula fed. And what we found is the 70% of parents who use Bobby are actually combo feeding. And they are being told by their doctor and by their pediatrician to introduce more vitamin D. So we put out vitamin D, but we also meet the European levels of vitamin D in the formula. But then the probiotics is, I'll bring you back to just more of my theory on this, you have some babies who need more probiotics and others who don't. So I think that the concept that there is a standard level for every baby is not true. It's not. Every baby is different. And whether you're

seeing it through their digestive track, struggling to be able to keep formula down through their, we say proof is in the poop, and the poop will tell you what needs to happen. So we put out probiotic drops for those parents that are looking for moments in time during that first year of feeding where they feel like they need to add it. But maybe they don't want it exclusively. Wow. What an incredible story. Thank God you were in that aisle, even though it was painful and frustrating. It was. Fever.

Allowed you to kind of come on the other side of it and do something good with the suffering you had. And the realization that, you know, you were not alone and there are many, many other women who are out there confused and uncertain and afraid and don't know how to navigate this and are told conflicting messages and also know that the existing formula market is really a mess

and that they're not getting quality that they want to feed their babies. And so thank you for taking a risk for leaving your job at Airbnb and for Google and just getting into a baby farmland. There's no greater joy. Honestly, I mean, I have four kids of my own. And the ability to wake up every day and know that I've been given the responsibility and duty to be able to feed babies. I mean, there's nothing that beats that. There's nothing. It's beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you, Laura. Thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. I learned a lot. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body,

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