She built a cult baby business, then RFK Jr came calling

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 are increasingly sceptical of government institutions, said Sara Petersen, the 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 wellbeing. This can become a gateway of sorts into Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement. It isn’t, in other words, a coincidence that the movement is fuelled by so-called “crunchy” mothers. The same mothers might also be Bobbie’s target customer.

Complicity, or a front seat?

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 US formula brands. She has also thrown the brand’s weight behind policies and non-profits 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 generated a cult-like following. Millennial parents seem especially interested in its nutritional value and are perhaps also drawn to its social media-ready packaging, with its soft colour palette and slogans such as, “I like it shaken, not stirred”.

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.

The company reached $US100 million ($156 million) in revenue in 2023 – making it the third-largest formula manufacturer in the United States, holding 4 per cent of that market – and is sold at Target and Whole Foods.

A contingent of Bobbie’s customers sees an about face in Modi’s alignment with 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 Modi with Kennedy.

Another customer, Allison Rhone, 43, a social media manager at a non-profit, noted that the Instagram caption lacked any context about what she called the “craziness” of much of Kennedy’s agenda. “That to me is complicity because it makes it all seem normal,” she said.

Meghan Novisky, 41, a Bobbie customer and a criminology professor at Cleveland State University, said: “It almost felt like a betrayal; I felt shocked to see that. 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?” Modi said in an interview.

“Two things can be true at the same time,” she said. “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 FDA.” But, she said, she saw value in being in the room with a decision-maker like Kennedy.

A “naive” plan

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 director of hospitality at Airbnb.

She 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 infant, she walked into a Walgreens at 11pm.

“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 few 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.

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In any spare minute, 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 Food and Drug Administration to be sold in the US (an increasingly common practice for parents).

The European Commission regulates formula differently, said Dr Bridget Young, a professor of paediatrics 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,” she said.

“You can’t, in Europe, use sucrose or table sugar,” she said. “In the US, we don’t regulate that.”

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Europe also sets different limits for ingredients like DHA (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 similar, and the small differences between them are marketed as large gulfs.

Formulas are also among “the safest foods made in the US”, Young said. “There’s no perfect formula; there’s no poison formula.”

Similac, for instance – which Modi weaned her daughter off in favour of the imports – is fed to babies in hospitals, including in the neonatal intensive care unit wards.

When, in December 2017, Modi found out she was pregnant again, she quit her job and decided to start Bobbie. “In my mind,” she said, “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 “naive”. For starters, there were the Goliaths of the market: the four manufacturers – Abbott, Mead Johnson (acquired by Reckitt), Nestle and Perrigo – which together controlled 97 per cent 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 Modi was 8½ months pregnant, in 2018, she had pitched the idea of a “European-style” formula to 64 investors. One gave her $US2.4 million in funding eight days before her second child arrived. It would be three more years before she would bring an FDA-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.

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 US store shelves 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.

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Modi bought a manufacturing facility in Ohio that began making Bobbie formula last year, allowing it to triple supply.

HHS now presents Modi with another opportunity: to fulfil her long-standing goals of updating infant nutrition standards. Kennedy’s MAHA agenda has many of the same talking points 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 that have been detected in formulas made in the US.

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 FDA division that regulates formula, Kennedy has named Kyle Diamantas, a corporate lawyer who defended Abbott in a lawsuit claiming that one of its formulas increased the risk of a deadly condition in infants. (Abbott, which lost the case, was ordered to pay $US495 million in damages.) Paediatricians 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.

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For 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 criticise the FDA 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,” Rhone said.

But to 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.”