The photo posted on X in March by the Department of Health and Human Services seemed innocuous.
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stands in the center, surrounded by Robert Ford, chief executive of Abbott Laboratories; Kris Licht, the chief executive of Reckitt; Patrick Lockwood-Taylor, chief executive of Perrigo; and Laura Modi, the founder and chief executive of Bobbie. The post was paired with an announcement that H.H.S. would work with these leaders to update the country’s nutrition guidelines for infant formula, which have remained unchanged since 1998.
But that photo set off an animated debate among fans of Bobbie, which has made its name over the last several years as an ingredient-conscious and science-based brand.
Some cheered on Ms. Modi for being the only woman there and the only one representing a newcomer to an industry dominated by old gatekeepers. When Bobbie shared the photo on its Instagram page, many of its followers threw fire and heart emojis all over its comments.
Others wondered if she should have been there at all, meeting with Mr. Kennedy, who they say is antithetical to everything they thought the Bobbie brand stood for.
That the other chief executives in the photo didn’t receive this kind of scrutiny illustrates the difficulty of being a business leader who has been vocal about their company’s purpose during the current administration, when every decision about a company’s values can become politically charged.
Companies that were on the cutting edge of the last decade’s wellness boom find themselves in a special bind. Some, like Sweetgreen, which once used the slogan “Make America Healthy Again,” have steered clear of Mr. Kennedy’s more controversial policies, while others, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand, long criticized for giving pseudoscience a platform, have embraced overlaps with many of the H.H.S. secretary’s priorities.
The debate encapsulates a conundrum that consumers face too: Even those who do not agree with President Trump’s policies may find themselves in sync with some of Mr. Kennedy’s philosophies on nutrition and wellness, like avoiding ultra-processed foods.
It’s a point of tension that tends to bubble up during motherhood, in particular, when many parents are trying to “figure things out on their own” and increasingly skeptical of government institutions, said Sara Petersen, author of “Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture.” Focusing on their child’s diet and lifestyle can create “an illusion of control” over their well-being. This can become a gateway, of sorts, into Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement. It isn’t, in other words, a coincidence that the movement is fueled by so-called “crunchy” mothers. The same mothers who might also be Bobbie’s target customer.
Complicity, or being in the room?
Ms. Modi, 39, started the Bobbie brand in 2018, creating infant formula that is marketed as free from corn syrup, palm oil and other ultra-processed ingredients that have been commonplace in formula brands in the United States. She has also thrown the brand’s weight behind policies and nonprofits focused on equity in maternal health, reproductive health and access to paid parental leave.
This marketing strategy has differentiated Bobbie from other formula brands and built a cultlike following. Millennial parents seem especially interested in its nutritional value and are perhaps also drawn to its social media-ready packaging, with its soft color palette and slogans like, “I like it shaken, not stirred.”
Ms. Modi, a mother of four, is a canny marketer, of both herself and her business. She was named one of Time’s Women of the Year in February and one of Marie Claire’s Power Moms in May. At least one mother got a tattoo of the Bobbie logo on her arm, and others purchased and posted Bobbie-branded caps and hoodies.
Months after ads for lactation cookies by the pregnant cookbook author Molly Baz were pulled down from Times Square for being too racy, Bobbie put a postpartum Ms. Baz back up there with her newborn latched to one breast and a can of its formula in one hand. The company reached $100 million in revenue in 2023 — making it the third-largest formula manufacturer in the United States, holding 4 percent of that market — and is sold in Target and Whole Foods.
A contingent of Bobbie’s customers see an about-face in Ms. Modi’s alignment with Mr. Kennedy, a man who has been accused by critics of undermining established science and promoting public health policies that they say put children’s lives at risk.
“I’m genuinely sad about this,” one follower wrote on the Instagram post of Ms. Modi with Mr. Kennedy.
Another customer, Allison Rhone, 43, a social media manager at a nonprofit, noted that the Instagram caption lacked any context about what she called the “craziness” of much of Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. “That to me is complicity, because it makes it all seem normal,” she said.
“It almost felt like a betrayal; I felt shocked to see that,” said Meghan Novisky, 41, a Bobbie customer and a criminology professor at Cleveland State University. “It just shatters my trust in them.” In interviews, others vowed never to use or recommend Bobbie again. (The company said it hadn’t seen a dip in subscriptions.)
But “what’s the potential outcome of not being in that room?” Ms. Modi said in an interview.
“Two things can be true at the same time. I don’t agree with many of the things that this current administration is doing. It’s very hard to watch the dismantling of really important agencies and, specifically within my world, parts of the F.D.A.,” Ms. Modi said. But, she said, she saw value in being in the room with a decision maker like Mr. Kennedy.
A ‘naïve’ plan
Ms. Modi moved from the west coast of Ireland to California for a job at Google in 2006. She planned to stay in the United States for a year or two before moving back to Ireland. Instead, she ended up climbing the corporate ladder and, in 2011, became the director of hospitality at Airbnb.
She had just assumed that she would breastfeed her first child, born in 2016, but her plans were upended by a nasty bout of mastitis, an infection of the breast. With a raging fever and a crying five-day old, she walked into a Walgreens at 11 p.m.
“What am I picking up? What’s the right thing to feed my baby?” she said, of the thoughts that were racing through her mind then. “No idea.” There were “two or three” formula brand options and the ingredient lists on the cans were incomprehensible. She walked out that night with a pack of Similac, manufactured by Abbott, and the germ of an idea.
In any spare minute, Ms. Modi looked up ingredients, researched infant nutritional science and examined how the existing formula brands functioned. She asked her mother to smuggle in cans of European brands for her daughter, which, at the time, were not approved by the F.D.A. to be sold in the United States (an increasingly common practice for parents).
The European Commission regulates formula differently, said Dr. Bridget Young, a professor of pediatrics and a breastfeeding researcher at the University of Rochester. Europe, for example, “sets limits on pesticide residues that can be in formula — we don’t do that here.”
“You can’t, in Europe, use sucrose or table sugar. In the U.S., we don’t regulate that,” she said. Europe also sets different limits for ingredients like D.H.A. (a fatty acid believed to be essential for brain and eye development) and iron. Still, she added, the approaches to making formulas around the world are very similar and the small differences between them are marketed as large gulfs.
Formulas are also among “the safest foods made in the U.S.,” Dr. Young said. “There’s no perfect formula, there’s no poison formula.” Similac, for instance — which Ms. Modi weaned her daughter off of in favor of the imports — is fed to babies in hospitals, including in the neonatal intensive care unit wards.
When, in December 2017, Ms. Modi found out she was pregnant again, she quit her job and decided to start Bobbie. “In my mind, I’m like, ‘I got nine months, I will have a better infant formula in the market before he comes.’”
That, she said, was incredibly “naïve.” For starters, there were the Goliaths of the market: the four manufacturers, Abbott, Mead Johnson (acquired by Reckitt), Nestlé and Perrigo, which together controlled 97 percent of the market in 2022. Infant formula is also highly regulated, presenting any new entrant with a labyrinth of hoops to jump through. And, infant formula being about as aspirational as antacid or Band-Aids, there were few eager investors. Most, many of whom were male, would also ask something to the effect of “‘Well, what are you planning to do with this?’ And point to my very visible pregnant belly,” she said.
By the time Ms. Modi was eight and a half months pregnant, in 2018, she had pitched the idea of a “European-style” formula to 64 investors. One gave her $2.4 million in funding eight days before her second child arrived. It would be three more years before she would bring an F.D.A.-approved product to market.
Crises and opportunities
In 2022, supply-chain disruptions and a bacterial outbreak that temporarily closed Similac’s plant set off a harrowing nationwide infant formula shortage. It left parents scrambling to figure out what or how to feed their babies.
The crisis became a wake-up call for Congress, highlighting the fundamental problem with letting a concentrated industry manufacture an essential good where a disruption at just one plant could have such vast consequences. As a quick solution, the Biden administration had to turn to European makers.
It also turned into a moment of opportunity for Bobbie. Since the brand’s inception, Bobbie products had been sold online through a subscription model and were manufactured at a contract facility that also works with other smaller brands. During the shortage, when store shelves across the U.S. sat bare, parents turned to Bobbie formula, creating a surge in demand that outpaced production at the contract facility. The company had to stop accepting new customers.
Ms. Modi bought a manufacturing facility in Ohio that began making Bobbie formula last year, allowing it to triple supply.
The H.H.S. now presents Ms. Modi with another opportunity: to fulfill one of her longstanding goals of updating infant nutrition standards. Mr. Kennedy’s MAHA agenda has many of the same talking points Ms. Modi has been espousing since 2018 — that European formulas are healthier, corn syrup in formula is a villain, and regulators need to increase testing of heavy metals, which have been detected in U.S.-made formulas.
At the same time, the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal public health workers and researchers, including a committee that tracks bacterial outbreaks in infant formula. As head of the Food and Drug Administration division that regulates formula, Mr. Kennedy has named Kyle Diamantas, a corporate lawyer who defended Abbott in a lawsuit claiming one of its formulas increased the risk of a deadly condition in infants. (Abbott, which lost the case, was ordered to pay $495 million in damages.) Pediatricians worry too that, under these circumstances, a review of nutrition standards could easily veer into MAHA obsessions, like seed oils (which contain fatty acids that are essential for infant development), instead of focusing on science.
In this environment, some of Bobbie’s most loyal customers wondered whether Mr. Kennedy was simply using that meeting for a photo opportunity.
“What I would want to see more of from Bobbie is for them to address the elephant in the room and say, ‘We understand your skepticism, we understand your concerns, here are our ideas to get our initiatives taken seriously,’” Ms. Novisky, the Bobbie customer, said.
For Ms. Rhone, part of the appeal of Bobbie was that it was marketed as an outsider to the infant formula industry, putting it in a position to criticize the F.D.A. and other agencies. “I just need to know that you’re going to be an actual advocate in there and that you’re not just going to nod your head to whatever they’re saying,” Ms. Rhone said.
Just how much influence Ms. Modi could have over updating formula standards guidelines is unclear. In May, the H.H.S. started the F.D.A. review of infant nutrition standards, and Ms. Modi received that update in an email at the same time as the news release was sent out; she has received little information about next steps. And the other executives in that photograph with Mr. Kennedy — the baby formula heavyweights — have many more years of playing the regulatory game and incentives not to change how they operate.
But to Ms. Modi, infant nutrition is a nonpartisan issue. “And if what it takes to update nutritional standards is a certain administration, certain voices to create that change, I’m all here for it.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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