Laura Modi says Bobbie’s FDA recall got the only U.S. formula contract manufacturer to make its product

Laura Modi says the FDA recall that could have buried Bobbie is what got Perrigo, the only U.S. infant formula contract manufacturer outside the giant brands, to call her back. That is the rare founder anecdote with an actual punchline, the door opened because the building was briefly on fire.

On How I Built This, Laura Modi tells Guy Raz the Bobbie story as a classic founder slog, immigrant hustle, Google and Airbnb pedigree, impossible category, exhausted new mother at the pharmacy, a tiny team doing the impossible. Fine. But the part that makes the episode more than another bedtime story for LinkedIn is the regulatory boomerang. Bobbie tried to sneak into the market as something called a companion formula, the FDA said nice try, and then the company that had previously waved her off decided she might be worth taking seriously.

couldn’t understand why I would dedicate my time, energy and capital to going to making something that the world didn’t need.

The episode spends plenty of time on the shame Modi felt buying formula after struggling to breastfeed, and that context matters because it explains why she could see a market that some male investors apparently treated like a moral failing with a barcode. She says one investor told her women should be breastfeeding, full stop. Another investor got stuck on her attack on corn syrup. This is the part where every founder story asks you to admire the protagonist for hearing no 60 times. In Modi’s case, the no was also useful market research. The people dismissing the product sounded exactly like the culture she wanted to sell against.

The startup move that was too startup

Bobbie’s early gambit was painfully legible to anyone who has spent time around tech people. If the rules make the obvious route slow, find the side door. The problem is that infant formula is not a photo-sharing app with a weird privacy policy. It is food for babies, sometimes the only food. Modi had a Germany-made product, a direct-to-consumer plan, and a small San Francisco pilot. What she did not have was the green light to sell it as U.S. infant formula.

the FDA doesn’t just normally show up. That just never happens.

The FDA showed up at the warehouse, looked at the product, and according to Modi, essentially said that if it looks like infant formula and quacks like infant formula, it is infant formula. The agency issued a national recall. Modi says she felt it was unfair because there was nothing nutritionally wrong with the product. Raz pushes back, correctly. This is one of the few industries where move fast and patch later sounds less like innovation and more like a congressional hearing waiting to happen.

My read, the FDA was right to stop it, and Modi is right that the stop accidentally proved her point. The market was so locked down that a startup with demand, branding, and a product thesis still couldn’t find a legal path to manufacture. The recall made Bobbie look risky to consumers, but it also made Bobbie visible to the one partner that mattered.

we watched what happened with the recall, and we want to make your product.

A recall as a recruiting email

That line is the whole episode in miniature. Perrigo had declined to make Bobbie’s formula before, Modi says, because Bobbie was basically moms in a basement. After the recall, an internal R&D champion at Perrigo saw a product close to the one he had wanted to build himself, grass-fed milk, European-style nutrition, more attention to DHA. The public embarrassment became a demo day.

There is some founder mythology here, of course. Every scar becomes strategy when the company survives. But the business logic checks out. Infant formula is a brutal category because the barriers are not just brand awareness or shelf space. The barriers are factories, suppliers, testing, FDA submissions, long lead times, and the fact that the incumbent giants, Abbott and Reckitt’s Mead Johnson, have had decades to make themselves feel inevitable.

Modi says Bobbie later launched in 2021, hoped for $4 million in first-year sales, and did $16 million. During the 2022 formula shortage, when Abbott’s recall helped empty shelves across the country, Bobbie had to stop taking new customers so existing subscribers could still feed their babies. That is the least sexy growth story imaginable. It is also the point. In formula, demand is not a dopamine chart. It is a crying infant at 2 a.m. and a parent staring at a canister like it is oxygen.

The company now has just under 4 percent of the U.S. market, Modi says, and she wants 10 percent, not a new monopoly with better typography. The episode leaves you with a clean irony, the Silicon Valley instinct got Bobbie in trouble, but the way Bobbie recovered from that trouble made the rest of the business possible. For a startup selling baby formula, the first real product was not the powder. It was trust, manufactured the hard way.