Reeves Wiederman reports on how the baby-formula shortage in the U.S. created an opportunity for new companies to enter an industry historically dominated by a few corporations. Laura Modi, a Google and Airbnb alum who founded the baby-formula startup Bobbie, is one such CEO hoping to transform an industry “that has grown complacent.”
As 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. She was fighting off a fever, her daughter was screaming, and she couldn’t kick the feeling that she had somehow failed. 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. The formula was packaged in primary colors and had a list of multisyllabic ingredients on the back: cholecalciferol, cyanocobalamin. And some of them used corn syrup? Forget about it. Feeding her child a can full of powdered ingredients she would never buy for herself felt like a betrayal. 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. Modi says she was so embarrassed by the can of Similac she bought that she hid it in the back of her cabinet.
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