In early January, the first night the L.A. wildfires raged, Laura Modi lay in her bed in Washington, D.C. wide awake at 1 a.m. worrying. The CEO and co-founder of Bobbie, an organic formula company, texted fellow co-founder, Sarah Hardy, to let her know that she wanted to meet first thing in the morning to discuss what they were going to do to help the victims of the fires. “Providing support in a time of need is in our company's DNA,” Modi says.
The next morning, Hardy quickly assembled a team to come up with a plan. “We couldn’t fathom that a parent who had just lost literally everything would have to wonder how they were going to feed their baby,” Hardy says. And so, they announced on Instagram that they were offering any parent who was affected by the fires free Bobbie formula—whether they were a customer or not—until their child turned one. “We thought, why would we stop with our customers? We should be doing this for every parent impacted by the fires,” Modi says.
Within five hours of posting on social media, they had given away 1,600 cans of formula (about $40,000 worth of product). They had also created a list of all their customers in the L.A. area and started calling them one by one to check in. “I could cry thinking about some of the responses,” Modi says. One woman shared that her house in Pacific Palisades burned down on the day she gave birth to her son; another spoke of how grateful she was for the formula since she’d had to leave behind a brand-new pack when she and her six-month-old evacuated their home in the California neighborhood of Eaton.
By January 15, eight days after the fires broke out, Bobbie had donated a total of 5,600 cans of formula to support various relief initiatives, from grassroots efforts to institutional non-profits with rapid response apparatuses.
"Everywhere I turned [after I became a parent], something was broken. It burned a deep fire inside of me to say, 'We need to do something about this.'”
Modi and Hardy’s response to the wildfires is a testament to their company’s brand values. “We’re always tying things back to: What is the social good? What is the impact we can make?” says Modi, who founded Bobbie in 2018 after struggling to find formula that she felt good about feeding to her first newborn daughter. “The product I ended up giving her was riddled with ingredients I wouldn't feed myself,” she says.
On top of that, she felt judged for giving her baby formula in the first place. “The conversation around using infant formula felt so stigmatized,” she says. “The expectation was that I would breastfeed…that ‘breast is best.’” But as Modi can attest, breastfeeding isn’t possible for everyone (her roadblock was a painful breast infection called mastitis), and some people simply choose not to. She wanted to change the narrative around feeding babies so that mothers were no longer shamed for using formula.
In 2017, Modi quit her job at Airbnb and devoted herself to researching the formula industry. “I learned that the nutritional requirements for infant formula hadn’t been updated in 40 years,” she says. “It was an industry that no one really looked at. It was left in the shadows.” She became determined to disrupt the industry. “I came to the conclusion that we as parents deserve to have something better.”
We couldn’t fathom that a parent who had just lost literally everything would have to wonder how they were going to feed their baby.
After locking in her first round of funding, Modi recruited Hardy, her former colleague and “work wife” at Airbnb, to join Bobbie in 2019. They collaborated with a team of scientists and pediatric nutritionists to develop the first ever, European-style formula in the U.S., and they launched it a year later.
Bobbie launched in January 2021, selling four times greater than forecasted in its first year, making it the fastest-growing infant formula in the U.S. since the 1980s. But for the first few years after getting Bobbie off the ground, the product was largely ignored, says Modi. It wasn’t until the formula shortage in 2022 that products, including Bobbie, entered the limelight. “All eyes were on the industry,” Modi says. “People were finally looking at formula as a vital, essential good.”
None of Bobbie’s customers went without formula during the shortage (the company stopped taking new subscriptions during that time to ensure they had enough product for current customers), but it still served as an inflection point for Modi and Hardy. “It was a massive wake-up call to just how broken the industry is and how symbolic something like infant formula is to so many other injustices that we as parents, as mothers, are constantly facing in the world,” Modi says.
Determined to make change in the industry, they decided to start a new arm of the company called Bobbie for Change that focuses on advocacy work and giving back to the community. “It was a no-brainer for us to start this advocacy and impact arm so that we could fight for our end goal, which is to change culture,” Modi says. Since launching in 2022, Bobbie for Change has introduced legislation that would help prevent another formula shortage, donated formula to moms who have had mastectomies, and fought for paid family leave.
There’s no doubt that becoming a parent turned Modi into an activist. “I remember everywhere I turned, something was broken,” she says. “It burned a deep fire inside of me to say, we need to do something about this.”
It was a massive wake-up call to just how broken the industry is and how symbolic something like infant formula is to so many other injustices that we as parents are constantly facing.
Both Modi and Hardy are on a mission to create change for the next generation. “We’re doing this for them,” says Modi, whose children are 9, 6, 4, and 1. “We have a real opportunity to create something better for their future.” And part of that is setting a positive example. “To me, role modeling is incredibly important,” says Hardy, who has an 8- and 10-year-old. “My kids are a little bit older now and I talk to them about my work. They know what I do and they understand the impact we’re having. That has been incredibly rewarding.”
This spring, the duo is launching The Feeding Room, a new service that will provide free feeding support to parents, whether they are breastfeeding, formula feeding, or both. In collaboration with the International Board Certified Lactation Consultants at NAPS, a company that provides lactation support for new parents, the online educational hub will offer expert-led feeding tutorials, live webinars, and a library of articles on all things feeding.
“One of the things we’ve learned over the years, after hearing from thousands of parents, is that the support system that surrounds how they feed is also broken,” Modi says. “This service will be an all-in-one, holistic support system for people, no matter where they are on their feeding journey.”
As their company continues to grow, Modi and Hardy find their power in connection with other parents. “This is not about a couple of moms making all this change,” Hardy says. “This is about sharing our experiences authentically, calling others in, and supporting one another. Of everything we’ve done, building this community is what has had the biggest impact.”
