By Kristen Beck
When news broke that ByHeart infant formula was linked to a botulism case following a national recall, the response followed a familiar pattern: shock, reassurances, and insistence that the incident was rare and unforeseeable.
But treating this crisis as an isolated failure misses a far more disturbing truth. ByHeart has bankrolled an aggressive marketing campaign that not only encouraged vulnerable new mothers to skip critical safety steps when preparing powdered formula, and did so while FDA inspection reports had already flagged their facilities for potential contamination risks.
Even more disturbing, that marketing campaign is still running all over social media platforms like Instagram. These are ads which would violate the World Health Organization marketing guidelines adopted by most countries. Yet, despite a national recall of all products manufactured since 2022, ByHeart paid partnerships with powerful motherhood influencers are still up and running. Most of these ads follow the same template: a video of a young mother describing why she chose ByHeart for her baby while she prepares a bottle.
The majority of these ads show the mother using filtered water, bottled water, or even tap water to mix ByHeart formula before handing it over to a delighted baby. This practice carries serious risks, since powdered formula is not sterile. That’s why every can of formula produced in the US, including ByHeart, has mandatory labeling warning parents to always boil water when they prepare formula. Indeed, the events of the 2022 Abbott formula recall linked to two infant deaths and a half dozen catastrophic injuries to infants 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. Why? Because formula companies like ByHeart know the need to boil water makes their claims of convenience flimsy. What’s convenient about waiting for water to boil at 3 a.m. or when you’re chasing one of your toddlers through a park when your newborn starts shrieking for their bottle? When every product marketed to moms promises to make early motherhood frictionless, the reality of watching a pot of boiling water while your baby screams for food gets downplayed or outright obscured, even when that threatens basic public health standards.
Part of the problem is that many parents believe that they’re instructed to boil water in order to sterilize the water source, instead of killing off potential pathogens that could lurk in the formula can. ByHeart’s advertising does nothing to disabuse parents of this notion.
Even worse, in 2025, after years of FDA reports showing potential cross-contamination and potentially lethal pathogens in their factories, ByHeart launched “Anywhere Packs,” slender, single-serve packets that easily fit in a purse. Uniformly, all the ads promoting this product show mothers mixing their formula with bottled water while on the go, in park, in the car, or on a sidewalk.
If you think these ads don’t have the power of a billboard or magazine advertisement, think again. According to calculations from the World Health Organization, formula marketing is a $51 billion industry, with 25 percent of those dollars going directly to influencers to promote products.
One would hope that a breastmilk substitute like formula that’s consumed by the most vulnerable humans on earth would be responsibly marketed. Well, don’t get your hopes up too high. Particularly in the digital era, social media companies like Meta also stand to turn a profit off the proliferation of these lucrative ads, despite a terms of service agreement that claims to protect the very young from harmful content.
It’s been shown time and again that pervasive formula marketing drives down breastfeeding rates and public health suffers. That is why a majority of countries have strict guardrails in place to protect new mothers from this type of predatory marketing. In a heavily consolidated market, with 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 formula companies have complete access to new mothers.
Sadly, ByHeart follows in a long tradition of aggressive and underhanded marketing that is a threat to public health. Look no further than to the tragic case of Angela Carter in Portland, Oregon. Carter had successfully breastfed her 10-month-old infant, which is encouraged for up to two years according to global public health standards. When she expressed some anxiety about her possibly waning breastmilk supply to her caseworker, Carter was given a donated can of ByHeart formula. Her case worker repeated advertising claims that ByHeart was “closest to breastmilk.” The can came via a ByHeart donation to a local diaper bank. The CDC discourages formula donations to organizations because it can disrupt and undermine breastfeeding. Catastrophically, Carter’s infant, Aashan, has now been hospitalized twice and is on a feeding tube due to consuming botulism-tainted formula from ByHeart.
While Aashan and more than 50 other babies have no voice in the dangerous gray zone in American regulation – treated simultaneously as food, medical necessity, and lifestyle product – mothers do. I’m a member of the Radical Moms Union, a grassroots collective of mothers who fight 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 ‘70s, my own radical mom was rightly horrified about Nestle’s predatory formula marketing in economically developing nations which resulted in babies dying. My family’s boycott of Nestlé’s many products meant no Stouffer’s Fettucine Alfredo or Tollhouse cookies for this kid. The sacrifice was felt. With my own children I ended up being that annoying mom worried about hidden carcinogens; I wouldn’t let my kids have microwaved popcorn or paint their nails indoors. I couldn’t always trust that companies prioritized my family’s health over their profits. Being a new mom is intense enough without corporations seeking to profit off the pitfalls of life with a baby.
Today, I join hundreds of other mothers and healthcare professionals in calling on ByHeart CEO Ron Belldegrun, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the Meta Advisory Board to take down these ads. Ignorance is no longer plausible. These ads remain live because the incentives reward inaction, so this is a choice – a choice by Meta to keep monetizing misinformation, a choice by ByHeart to keep marketing despite known harm, and a choice to prioritize revenue over infant safety.
About the author: Kristen Beck is a member of The Radical Moms Union, which is a diverse group of mothers. It is organizing to protect the mother-baby dyad from corporate threats. Its members believe in attachment over independence, in biological needs over cultural demands. The group is critical of any system, trend, or advice that encourages women to outsource their power to gadgets, influencers, or multi-national corporations.