Years before outbreak, ByHeart’s marketing encouraged dangerous practices
By Kristen Beck
When news broke that ByHeart infant formula was linked to a case of botulism following a national recall, the response followed a familiar pattern: shock, reassurances and insistence that the incident was rare and unpredictable.
But viewing this crisis as an isolated failure misses a much more worrying truth. ByHeart funded an aggressive marketing campaign that not only encouraged vulnerable new mothers to skip critical safety steps when preparing powdered formula, even though FDA inspection reports had already flagged their facilities for potential contamination risks.
Even more worrying, this marketing campaign is always on all on social media platforms like Instagram. These are advertisements that would violate World Health Organization marketing guidelines adopted by most countries. Yet despite a national recall of all products manufactured since 2022, ByHeart’s paid partnerships with powerful maternity influencers are still ongoing. Most of these ads follow the same template: a video of a new mother describing why she chose ByHeart for her baby while she prepares a bottle.
The majority of these commercials show the mother using filtered water, bottled water, or even tap water to mix the ByHeart formula before handing it to a delighted baby. This practice carries serious risks, because powdered preparations are not sterile. That’s why every can of formula produced in the United States, including ByHeart, has mandatory labeling warning parents to always boil water when preparing formula. Indeed, the events of the 2022 Abbott formula recall, linked to two infant deaths and half a dozen catastrophic infant injuries, underscore the need to sterilize powdered formula.
Yet influencer ad after ad shows mothers using room temperature water to prepare formula and ByHeart does nothing to correct or qualify the content. For what? Because baby formula companies like ByHeart know that the need to boil water makes their convenience claims flimsy. What’s the point in waiting for the water to boil at 3 a.m. or chasing one of your toddlers around a park when your newborn starts screaming for his bottle? While every product marketed to moms promises to make early motherhood frictionless, the reality of staring at a pot of boiling water while your baby screams to eat is downplayed or outright obscured, even when it threatens basic public health standards.
Part of the problem is that many parents believe they are being asked to boil water in order to sterilize the water source, instead of killing potential pathogens that might be hiding in the can of formula. ByHeart’s advertising does nothing to disabuse parents of this notion.
Worse, in 2025, after years of FDA reports showing potential cross-contamination and potentially deadly pathogens in their factories, ByHeart launched “Anywhere Packs,” thin, single-serve packets that fit easily in a purse. Consistently, all commercials promoting this product show mothers mixing their formula with bottled water while out and about, in a park, in a car, or on a sidewalk.
If you think these ads don’t have the power of a billboard or magazine ad, think again. According to calculations by the World Health Organization, the marketing of infant formula is a A $51 billion industrywith 25 percent of those dollars going directly to influencers to promote products.
One would hope that a breast milk substitute, such as infant formula, consumed by the most vulnerable humans on the planet, would be marketed responsibly. Well, don’t get your hopes up. Particularly in the digital age, social media companies like Meta could also profit from the proliferation of these lucrative ads, despite a terms of service agreement that purports to protect the very young from harmful content.
It was shown time and time again that the widespread marketing of infant formula is lowering breastfeeding rates and public health is suffering. This is why the majority of countries have strict safeguards in place to protect new mothers from this type of predatory marketing. In a highly consolidated market, more than 90 percent controlled by just four companies (Abbott Nutrition, Mead Johnson Nutrition, Nestlé USA and Perrigo Company), the United States is one of the few countries where infant formula manufacturers have complete access to new mothers.
Unfortunately, ByHeart is part of a long tradition of aggressive, underhanded marketing that poses a threat to public health. Look no further than the tragic case of Angela Carter in Portland, Oregon. Carter successfully breastfed her 10-month-old baby, which is encouraged up to two years according to global public health standards. When she expressed some concern to her social worker that her breast milk supply might be decreasing, Carter was given a can of ByHeart formula. Her social worker reiterated in the ad that ByHeart was “closest to breast milk.” The can came via a ByHeart donation to a local diaper bank. The CDC discourages formula donations to organizations because it can disrupt and harm breastfeeding. Catastrophically, Carter’s infant, Aashan, has now been hospitalized twice and is tube fed due to consuming botulism-contaminated formula from ByHeart.
While Aashan and more than 50 other babies have no voice in the dangerous gray zone of U.S. regulations — treated as food, medical necessity and lifestyle product all at once — mothers do. I am a member of Union of Radical Moms, a grassroots collective of mothers fighting to protect vulnerable infants and mothers from predatory companies like ByHeart and Meta. I joined Rad Moms because I’m obsessed with protecting moms and babies from unhinged corporate threats. As a child in the 1970s, my own radical mother was rightly horrified by the predatory marketing of Nestlé’s infant formula in economically developing countries, which resulted in the deaths of babies. That of my family boycott of NestleIt is many products didn’t mean Stouffer’s Fettuccine Alfredo or Tollhouse cookies for this child. The sacrifice was felt. With my own children, I ended up being that annoying mother who worried about hidden carcinogens; I wouldn’t let my kids eat microwave popcorn or paint their nails indoors. I couldn’t always believe that companies prioritized my family’s health over their profits. Being a new mom is intense enough without companies trying to profit from the pitfalls of life with a baby.
Today I join hundreds of other mothers and healthcare professionals by calling on ByHeart CEO Ron Belldegrun, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the Meta Advisory Board to remove these ads. Ignorance is no longer plausible. These ads stay online because the incentives reward inaction. So this is a choice: a choice by Meta to continue monetizing misinformation, a choice by ByHeart to continue marketing despite known harms, and a choice to prioritize revenue over infant safety.
About the author: Kristen Beck is a member of the Radical Moms Union, a diverse group of mothers. He organizes himself to protect the mother-baby dyad from corporate threats. Its members believe in attachment rather than independence, in biological needs rather than cultural demands. The group criticizes any system, trend or advice that encourages women to outsource their power to gadgets, influencers or multinational corporations.
