THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 25gling startup with serious cash flow issues, a myriad of options
were discussed in the pursuit of a sustainable milk bank
operation, given the high cost to qualify donors.”
Medo’s professional concerns were intensified by the degree to
which she felt Elster was sidelining her. After returning from a
business trip, she says, she found he’d essentially cut her office in
half and she had no air conditioning or light switch. Prolacta
counters that Medo was aware that the space was being allocated
to better accommodate the growing workforce and all errors were
addressed before the project was completed. “Needing an antago-
nist for her narrative, and with none of her prior board members
still active, Medo has pinned her ire on the CEO who was
appointed more than six months after Medo willingly stepped
down from the role,” Marjorie Guymon, one of Prolacta’s
attorneys, wrote me.
Medo quit her job in the summer of 2008 and agreed to stay on
as a consultant. At a February 2009 meeting, she ended her
working relationship with Prolacta.S
hortly after, Medo started the company that would become
Medolac. She decided not to sell another fortifier because
she suspected hospitals weren’t going to switch from
Prolacta, so she decided to create something new: a breast milk
that, thanks to a process called retort sterilization that is used by
brands like Capri-Sun to make their products shelf stable, didn’t
need to be frozen. Eliminating refrigeration costs, she believed,
could help make her product more affordable and waste less milk.
Once she had a product, Medo needed to figure out how to
bring in a supply of milk. This time, instead of partnering with or
creating milk depots, on Mother’s Day 2013, her daughter
Adrienne started a co-op milk bank called Mothers Milk Coopera-
tive. The milk suppliers had a larger stake in the organization.
They were members who could vote, sit on the board, and receive
one share of stock and dividend payments in profitable years.
Most notably, the women could either choose to donate or receive
$1 an ounce in return.
Medo had come to the conclusion that if she or anyone else was
going to make money off women’s bodily products, then paying
the women was the way to show them they were valued. Women
were already selling their own milk online, a practice that many
clinicians say is unsafe. In a 2013 article published in the journal
Breastfeeding Medicine, Medo asked why “should women be
expected to give freely of an increasingly valuable substance they
independently produce, own, and control when the present
system allows others to profit from their generosity?”
Once again, Medo’s practice became the norm among for-
profit companies. Although Elster said in a 2011 Wired article that
“We have to make it altruistic. ... Otherwise, there’ll be a picture of
a mom on the front page of the New York Times saying, ‘I sold my
milk for crack,’ ” Prolacta started paying milk suppliers in 2014. In
response to a question about why the company changed course,
Elster credited changes in science. “At that point in time (2011),
testing wasn’t available to ensure the safety of the milk for the
fragile infants who rely on this nutrition for their health and
development,” he wrote me.
But this payment model eventually led to Medolac’s next big
public scandal. In partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative,
the company attempted to launch a program to expand its milk
donation program in Detroit. In its marketing materials it said
that paid donation would extend breastfeeding in African
American communities and encourage women to maintain a
healthy lifestyle since the milk would be screened.trouble fundraising but acknowledges that she agreed to give up
some control. She was replaced and demoted to chief strategic
officer, and in October 2006, a new CEO stepped in. “As a woman
entrepreneur, I was very distraught when they brought a man in
to run the company,” she says. “But I decided that I would just
muscle through it.”
The new CEO, Scott Elster, came from the company Baxter,
which sells human blood products. What has made blood
different from milk, business-wise, is that certain proteins in
blood plasma, when separated from blood, are used as lifesaving
therapeutics, and paid donation helps to keep up with the
demand. As in the blood industry, Elster saw a parallel long-term
symbiotic relationship between the nonprofit milk banks and
Prolacta’s for-profit venture.
But Medo felt that Elster didn’t understand some of the
sensitivities of the breast milk business. For example, she says he
asked about placing minimum ounce limits on women who were
milk suppliers, which Medo deemed unfair because sometimes
unforeseen incidents caused women to lose supply. “I said, ‘You
know how it is when you have little kids: Maybe the toddler and
the school-aged kids have gotten chickenpox, and Mom’s not
pumping and/or Dad lost his job,” Medo says. “You can’t mandate
a certain amount of milk production.”
Prolacta wrote me in response, “When Prolacta was a strug-“As a woman
entrepreneur,
I was very
distraught
when they
brought a
man in to run
the company,”
Elena Medo
says.