Laura Modi, co -founder and executive director of the Bobbie Children's Formula Startup, has the mission of transforming an industry that, according to her, has stagnated for decades and changes the culture around how parents feed their babies.
Modi, a former Airbnb executive, came up with Bobbie's idea after the birth of his first child.
“I remember having entered a pharmacy buying children's formula and with the hope that they would give me a bag that I could not see through it, because I felt very embarrassed by the product I was buying,” Modi recalls in a new episode of the podcast “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” with Julia Boorstin of CNBC.
Modi was appointed in the CNBC Changemakers inaugural list in 2024.
They are not only the emotional aspects of consumer transaction that motivated Modi, but the fact that the product itself was an indication of a change resistant market.
“Granola bars have changed, fries bags, soft drinks, but nevertheless, a product as important as the children's formula remained the same one that was 40 years before,” says Modi.
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The children's formula is a great market, and a classic example of a market where the owners have not been encouraged by the competition to innovate, according to Modi.
A report by the Federal Trade Commission in 2022, when a national formula shortage occurred, highlighted the risks of what has long been seen as a duopoly market. The two companies that dominate the production of children's formula in the US. They are Reckitt and Abbott, with a combined market share based on government contracts estimated at almost 70% in 2022 (which is below 80% in 2008). It is estimated that the market share is even greater when it includes non -governmental sales. Nestlé and Perrigo have also been prominent formula suppliers: Perrigo bought the formula business based in the United States and Canada in the United States and Canada in 2022, and has a co-manufacturing manufacturing relationship with Bobbie.
It was the ABBOTT formula manufacturing closure in 2022 after a retreat that led to a renewed approach in the risk of market concentration.
“I think we all assume that this is a merchandise. It is a childhood formula. It should be available,” says Modi. “When the president said: 'The United States cannot feed babies,' you start unpacking it.”
Bobbie, which modified in 2018, has quickly won traction by focusing on the quality of the product: in April, Bobbie presented the first and only formula of whole milk milk manufactured in the United States, and a commercial philosophy aligned in the mission, including a campaign with celebrities defending by the family license paid.
“Do not sell the product,” says Modi about the marketing message. “Fight for paid license and at the end of the segment or at the end of the ad, why don't you put a phone number so that people call their representative so that they can explain why they need a paid license, why we need to fight for the crisis of black maternal mortality, why the child care costs are through the roof? We observe the problems that parents really take care Bag board of the table seen to the problems. Product itself.
Bobbie initial products reached the market in 2021 as the first direct children's formula based on subscription in the US.
Executing in a social mission has not come without being attracted to politics. Modi was recently at the receiving end of the violent reaction of some clients after he joined a federal round table with some of the largest manufacturers of baby formula organized by the Government and was photographed with controversial Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Yes, it happens to be so the current administration comes with sum Polarizing perspectives, and When I Received The Phone Call To Say You Are Being Invited into a Roundable conversation conversation around the future of your industry, and the rest of the ceos of the infant formula space, who all happen to be men, will That Room, You Better Believe I Took That Invite, and I Took That invite Becouse If I Didn't My Voice and the Voice of Mothers and The Voice of Our Community or The Next Generation, was going to be missing at that table, “says Modi to CNBC. “The general intention is to improve the industry, regardless of who is in the seat.”
Balancing defense with the realities of executing a startup and raising four children require discipline. Modi says that he trusts a “personal and professional” night and professional “that consists in his qualification on a scale of one to five. It also tells CNBC about the quite “strict shared calendar” that the family maintains for each member.
In an industry where the resilience of the supply chain became important national news, Modi says that he remains integrally linked to his greatest challenge. Bobbie began to produce formula in an important manufacturing plant in Ohio that built from scratch last year, a movement that Modi says it is critical for safety and stability.
“The biggest challenge is that this is a highly regulated degree product, really pharmaceutical, and although it is on the shelf in many ways as a product of assets packaged to the consumer, it will not be able to go to a store and find any other product that is essentially the alternative to something that the human body creates as the only nutrition for the youngest audience,” she says. “We have moved very fast, we have become the company of faster growth formulas. This is a decade of parenting, promoting its safety, its quality, continues to invest again in it.”
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