Abbott Introduces America’s First Liquid Baby Formula With Whole Milk

No one can accuse MAHA of being formulaic.

Even when the topic in question is, somewhat paradoxically, formula itself. Healthcare giant Abbott announced Monday that it would shake up infant nutrition markets by launching a ready-to-feed liquid baby formula made with whole milk. It’s a first-of-its-kind product on US shelves, and, yes, it’s an attempt to leverage the Make America Healthy Again moment and MAHA-curious parent demographic for every penny they’re worth.

Put Out to Pasteur

The benefit of whole milk-based baby formula, some parents say, is that whole milk more closely mirrors the fat blend found in breast milk than powdered baby formula mixed with water. Typical powdered formulas still provide all the necessary fats and nutrients that babies require; they’re just introduced by different means such as vegetable oils.

The whole milk formula market has already been tapped in the past few years, albeit only in powdered varieties. The debut of a ready-to-drink liquid product offers not just a more convenient alternative (there’s no measuring, mixing or shaking required) to the powder form, but a potentially far safer one:

• Since last year, powdered milk formulas from two different startups, ByHeart and Nara, have been linked to botulism outbreaks among infants. They were the first-known botulism outbreaks ever linked to baby formula in the US, according to the Food and Drug Administration, and neither has resumed sales.
• Abbott’s liquid offering, like other ready-to-drink liquid formulas, will undergo a sterilization process during manufacturing that kills all germs including the spores that cause botulism.

“We decided on a liquid-only approach to give families the benefits of whole milk, the convenience of a formula that’s ready when baby is, and the reassurance that comes with a commercially sterile liquid formula,” Abbott’s US vice president and general manager for pediatric nutrition, Misha Pardubicka-Jenkins, said in a statement on Monday.

Pricing Formula: One catch is that extra steps for sterilization add a lot of extra costs for liquid formulas compared with powdered ones. Abbott has already vowed to price its new whole milk product at a similar price point to its regular powdered formula, meaning catering to the MAHA crowd might require eating into its margins.