Baby Milk Action sent its company profile on Minbie to the company for its response.

The profile shows how the company encourages mothers to introduce feeding bottles with its teats from day one, claiming that this “nurtures a proper breastfeeding latch”.

Asked in its online chat for substantiation for its claims, Minbie responded that it was disappointed by the “need for evidence based practice”.

Details in the Minbie profile in our Look What They’re Doing in the UK 2017 monitoring report.

The response from the company to the profile is given below in its entirety.

Dear Mike,

Thank you and Baby Milk Action so much for contacting us with your concerns. We really appreciate the information and feedback and have communicated your concerns to our marketing department.

There is a beautiful quote “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Mothers are wonderfully educated about the benefits of breastfeeding in Australia, and the Australian health system and the paid parental leave supports mothers to breastfeed and gives fathers parental leave as well to support the mothers. However, even with all this wonderful support, there are situations when a bottle is needed – whether it’s after a traumatic birth and the mother’s milk supply is not yet through, or the mother is on medication, or whether the mother has a serious bout of mastitis…or the newborn has a weak-latch…or the mother has to go back to work… Then, with breast-pumps being so good these days, mothers are expressing.

For those situations when “life happens”, the multiple award-winning and patented Minbie baby’s teat is there to support the babies to keep practicing for breastfeeding with their instinctive breastfeeding technique. This is a major breakthrough in supporting babies to not get nipple-confusion. The Minbie is due to be having a clinical trial soon.

If every mother had sufficient supply for their baby from birth and if every baby could latch-on and breastfeed whenever needed for the first year or longer, then there would be no need for the Minbie.

The Minbie was designed to encourage and protect breast-feeding. There is no intention to create a belief that bottle feeding is equivalent or superior to breastfeeding. If we don’t market this product, then breastfeeding mothers won’t know and they will continue to use teats that can give their babies nipple-confusion.

Once again, thanks for your feedback about the Minbie marketing. Feel free to discus this with us if you have concerns. I think we have mutual concerns to protect breastfeeding.

Kind regards,
Julia, Minbie Team