As many a parent knows all too well, along with getting your baby to sleep, getting them to eat can be one of the biggest challenges of those early weeks and months.
Just ask Elke Pascoe. The Perth-born, Sydney-based single mum welcomed her children Olive and Freddie in 2011 and 2013 respectively, and with each one her feeding journey was extremely difficult.
Like 71 per cent of Australian mums, her breast milk alone was not enough to nourish her growing babies. Both children are lactose intolerant and the formulas she supplemented their milk feeds with caused them to suffer skin rashes and digestive issues.
By the time she had her son, she decided to do something about it.
Fuelled by her own struggles as well as a desire to help mums everywhere who might be struggling with feeding their babies, in 2016 Ms Pascoe founded her own formula company, LittleOak. “My mission is two-fold: first, to make available to mums everything I wish I had ready access to when my kids were babies, and second, to ensure no child in the world goes to sleep hungry,” she says.
After pouring “all my last life savings” into the business, she gradually built up a following both in Australia and overseas, particularly in the United States where she got the kind of break that only the social media age can deliver: a popular American influencer featured the brand on Instagram, leading to a massive spike in sales. At the time the products weren’t available in parts of the US, so mums began to smuggle LittleOak cans into the country. “And it’s just grown into a sort of crazy cult following,” Ms Pascoe laughs.
Fast-forward to 2022 and she employs a team of 20 people, is gearing up to open her first Perth warehouse in early 2023, the operation’s ninth worldwide, and LittleOak is the fastest growing formula product in Western Australia.
“Where we see the demand, we’ll definitely invest and I’m just really pleased that it’s WA given that it’s my home,” Ms Pascoe says of the push into WA. “So it’s really exciting that we can build the brand out here.”
But the journey hasn’t been without its low points. “There have been points there where I was worried about whether I could even feed my children,” Ms Pascoe says. “I’m a single mum and I threw everything into it. But I just kept (thinking) you’ve got to keep going, because you’re doing a really good thing.”
So what is it about this little Aussie startup that’s led it to find global success in a market dominated by big business?
Ms Pascoe believes it’s their commitment to crafting the most naturally wholesome and nutritional formula possible, a mission that led her to one key ingredient: goat’s milk.
Considered the closest alternative to human breast milk, Ms Pascoe stumbled upon its benefits after using goat milk-based skincare products to treat Freddie’s skin issues. “It cleared his skin up pretty rapidly,” she recalls.
Ms Pascoe is not alone in her struggle with child allergies. Professor Valerie Verhasselt, a professor and researcher at the University of Western Australia and the head of the Centre of Research for Immunology and Breastfeeding at the Telethon Kids Institute, with a PhD in immunology, says Australia has one of the highest rates of child allergies in the world.
She cites a 2017 Melbourne-based study which found 10 per cent of one-year-olds had a food allergy. “And the same in Perth — it’s about 5 per cent to 10 per cent who have a food allergy,” she says.
“The incidence is extremely high, and the fact is we don’t know why, and I think we will never know why. It’s just a whole change of society. We can see in China where they build a new city in 10 years, you go from zero per cent to 10 per cent of children having allergies very, very, very quickly.”
Ms Pascoe says the more she began to learn about the properties of goat’s milk, the more she realised it could be a game-changer for other parents of children with allergies.
“So we went from starting with goat milk — because the more I understood about goat milk, it was significantly closer to breast milk, with significantly more natural goodness — and then we just built in all the other ingredients. And if they had to go in, we were going to source them from the most natural source we could find.”
That commitment meant, for instance, using only fresh, whole milk from New Zealand goats, as opposed to dried milk powder which is how most other formulas are produced. “This means there’s significantly less processing involved,” Ms Perrot, who consulted with Ms Pascoe when she was developing LittleOak, explains. “So it provides significantly more natural goodness, and that is really important.”
It also meant making the range, which includes baby formula and toddler milks, free from palm oil and replacing canola oil with cold-pressed flaxseed oil — both firsts for an infant formula. “They don’t use any fillers either, (which is) pretty standard in many of the other formulas,” Ms Perrot says. “There’s no fillers or fluff, there’s no whey protein, no maltodextrin, it’s only whole goat’s milk.”
She says the reason goat’s milk formula is so beneficial is that it’s lower in lactose compared to cow’s milk-based products, resulting in fewer allergies and digestive stress, and also contains naturally occurring oligosaccharides. “So that makes it more similar to human breast milk,” she says. “The oligosaccharides are really important for developing a healthy microbiome in the baby.
“Goat’s milk, it naturally supports a child’s growth and development due to its naturally occurring sources of vitamins, minerals, other nutrients,” she adds. “So it’s really rich in B vitamins, vitamin A, magnesium, calcium, carbohydrates, protein, pre and probiotics.”
For Ms Pascoe, crafting the most natural, wholesome products possible — and making sure parents know exactly what’s in them — is at the core of everything she does.
And it’s why her ethos will always be about making generational change rather than profits. “I mean literally we’ve made probably the most expensive infant formula in the market in terms of the cost of ingredients that go in it,” she says. “But I just make no excuses for that, because in my mind every child deserves the best and the most natural option they can, if mum chooses to breastfeed or can’t breastfeed.”
One thing she’s come to realise along her journey is that the very topic of baby formula is nothing if not contentious.
The World Health Organisation’s official recommendation is for babies to be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life, and for breastfeeding to continue (alongside the introduction of solid foods) up to the age of two. However, it’s estimated only 44 per cent of infants up to six months old are exclusively breastfed.
According to the Australian Breastfeeding Association, the majority of mothers want to breastfeed; 96 per cent begin when their baby is born, but by the age of approximately three months, only 39 per cent of babies are still being exclusively breastfed. By six months, only 60 per cent are still receiving some breast milk, and only 5 per cent reach the two-year mark.
And it’s perhaps not hard to understand why. Consider the physical, emotional and financial costs of feeding a child from one’s body as many as 10 times each day, and that’s without curveballs like mastitis, reflux, latching issues or any number of other problems that can present. Many struggling parents turn to lactation consultants, ‘supply-boosting’ supplements, restrictive diets, pumping or buying other women’s expressed breast milk, paediatrician and specialist visits, often persevering with breastfeeding at the expense of their own wellbeing.
Indeed, breastfeeding is far from being the easy option.
Yet, despite the push in recent years to move away from the “breast is best” mantra that so many new mothers encounter, and considering the large proportion of parents who statistics show do opt for formula or mixed feeding, there remains a stigma around its use. Even the labels on formula tins are branded with a version of the message that it’s an inferior choice.
The formula shortage that struck the US earlier this year brought a lot of these issues into the spotlight, as parents scrambling to find the products they needed to feed their babies were met with judgment and calls to solve the problem by simply breastfeeding.
Ms Pascoe — who saw four weeks worth of sales in just three days at the peak of that crisis — says the shortage highlighted how vital formula is to so many families. “For us, there’s an opportunity to give these kids, wherever they may be, whether the baby’s here or in the US, a better product, that feels like I’m doing my job.”
Prof. Verhasselt says that while human breast milk is indeed “magic”, the emphasis should always be on whatever works for the family. “The reality today (is) society is not made for everyone to breastfeed for six months,” she says. “And psychologically, it’s also very heavy for a mother to think that she’s obliged to breastfeed, and it can be very difficult. So it is good to have an option in case of, and make that option as good as possible.
“Every help is good because it’s hard, breastfeeding,” she adds. “It’s fantastic but heavy, heavy, heavy work.”
She, too, acknowledges the breastfeeding versus formula debate is about as contentious as it gets. “It’s like vaccines — everyone has a very strong opinion,” she says. “A bit too strong, I think. Once we go to very affective, emotional, strong opinions, we leave the scientific evidence.
“The baby will not die if not breastfed. It’s important. It puts too much pressure on the shoulder, and the mother can make her choice without feeling that guilty.”
For Ms Pascoe, it’s her aim to simply help make life that little bit easier for parents, who are already bombarded with advice, information and opinions.
“As I say to my (team), we work in this industry where every single day we can help a child,” she says. “We can help millions of children if we do it correctly.
“When you look at what families are going through with feeding, firstly, breastfeeding in itself can be super difficult. It’s society, that guilt you feel, that mothers are still burdened with, and then they have the pressures of becoming a parent, having to go back to work, all the other pressures that go with just life. And then layer on top of that all of these brands and an industry that has for decades been selling sub-optimum nutrition under the guise of being healthy, to unwitting mums and dads.”
As Ms Pascoe recently told someone who asked her what she would do if the major formula manufacturer started to copy LittleOak, “I hope they do”. “Because if our little company can help an industry create much better products for children, then to me we’ve done our job.”