River Oak’s Motherhood Center is debuting a new way to help mothers preserve their breast milk.
The center is teaming up with the Houston-based company Milkify to offer new mothers a chance to convert their breast milk into powder. Parents will drop off the breast milk at a kiosk at the Motherhood Center, then it will be delivered to their home about a week later in its newly powdered form.
According to both the founders of Milkify and Gabriela Gerhart, the founder of The Motherhood Center, it was a natural fit for the center to house the kiosk because they are already providing breast feeding support to many of their 35,000 clients.
“Part of the goal of the kiosk is to help make pumping at work or on the go a less daunting process,” said Berkley Luck, a co-founder of Milkify. “But also, the kiosks are a place that moms can drop off their milk, knowing that it’s secure and then get it back in the mail as powder.”
“The Motherhood Center seemed like a natural fit for the first kiosk and a great way for us to introduce the service to the Houston area,” Luck added.
Many of the Motherhood Center’s clients are professional women, according to Gerhart, which makes breast feeding their children through an entire year difficult. In addition to working, moms could have a lack of milk supply and available storage at home or at work.
The powdered breast milk, created through dry freezing the milk, removes some of the challenges that pumping brings as it it’s easier to store and the powder preserves many of the milk’s nutrients and vitamins that freezing often removes.
“The freeze-drying process is actually a better way to preserve breast milk,” said Luck. “The nutrients, the vitamins, the immune factors and probiotics are better preserved.”
According to Milkify, the storage life of powdered breast milk is three years. And, according to the latest CDC Breastfeeding Report Card, 84 percent of all infants born in 2017 started out breastfeeding. By six months, the percentage of breastfed infants decreased to 58 percent. Only 35 percent made it to the one-year goal as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
One of the reasons many women in the U.S. do not continue to breastfeed through the entire year, according to Milkify co-founder and husband to Luck, Pedro Silva, is the, “lack of a culture of lactation support in this country.”
“I’m from Brazil, where we have over a hundred milk banks for a population that’s much smaller that the U.S. Here, we only have 24 milk banks in total, for the entire country,” said Silva. “In terms of maternity leave, the investment that companies make in lactation support for women who are returning to the office, the US has just lagged behind the rest of the developed world.”
Infant formula is also heavily marketed as being equivalent to breast milk, “when the fact remains, and it’s been said by doctors and the World Health Organization, that breast milk is still the best nutrition for your infant,” Silva said.
Being able to powder breast milk, Luck and Silvia hope, can help mitigate some of those issues.
At the Motherhood Center, all first-time customers can drop off a standard lactation bag of pumped milk, between 90 and a 100 ounces of breast milk, and get it delivered to their home for free. After that, it costs about $199 per month.
To learn more about the free trial offer, visit the Milkify Kiosk for instructions or go to www.milkify.me/motherhoodcenter for more information.
ryan.nickerson@hcnonline.com