Nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit can spend an entire shift waiting for breast milk to defrost so they can prepare bottles for their hungry patients. This can wind up costing hospitals millions of dollars in labor each year and prevent nurses from performing patient care.
BBy is out to disrupt what CEO Dr. Vansh Langer called a 70-year-old freeze-and-defrost process with its technology that turns donor breast milk into shelf-stabilized, powdered breast milk.
“There’s a huge opportunity here to change the ‘milk shift,’” Langer told TechCrunch. “If nothing else, It’s a $12 billion annual labor play in the United States and beyond.”
Langer started the New York–based company in 2015 with bioengineer and food scientist Blanca Rosa Aguilar Uscanga, PhD, who had written a paper on the challenges of creating powdered breast milk in a way that it would retain the bioactive elements that mak...
