Imagine the world without iPhones, Zoom or 3D printing. Disruptive technologies have reshaped our lives – creating affordable and more accessible health care, connecting people across the oceans, and streamlining services to make life easier. At Emulait, we believe that families deserve to experience the full benefits of innovation.
Disrupting the infant feeding space was a mission that our founder took seriously. With years of personal and professional experience in the world of innovative diabetes management, it wasn’t long after his first child was born that he realized he had stumbled (bleary-eyed!) into a majorly underdeveloped space. Watching his wife struggle with breastfeeding highlighted the huge gap that existed between bottles and breastfeeding, and the immense pressure that moms experience on their baby’s feeding journey. As with all good innovation - Emulait was born into that gap.
Getting started
Bringing together top experts in infant feeding, engineering and product design, the Emulait team set out to explore the limitations of the existing baby bottle industry using the breast as their natural prototype. It was quite astounding to discover that the baby bottle industry had been unchanged for many years, limited by a lack of vision, technology and materials.
Guided by the principles of “biomimicry” - nature-inspired design, we turned to moms for inspiration. Breastfeeding is widely regarded as the gold standard for feeding yet many mothers struggle to sustain breastfeeding past six months (ref link). Some mothers and their babies require supplementary bottle use from the early days, and there are mothers who are unable to - or choose not to - breastfeed at all. Breastfeeding is considered the ideal feeding source both because of the nutritional quality of breastmilk, but it also offers:
- Oral development benefits: Breastfeeding engages all of the baby's oral muscles. When the nipple is pulled into the mouth, the tongue works hard to compress the nipple and extract the milk using a wave-like motion (peristaltic). If it sounds like hard work, it is! And that’s what makes it so good for a baby’s development.
- Neurodevelopmental benefits: All of this extraction effort affords control and exercises the vagus nerve, which is responsible for self-regulation (ref link). Studies suggest that the act of breastfeeding helps reduce the likelihood of obesity later in life.
- Socioemotional benefits: Engaging baby in a naturally paced feed is the heart of responsive feeding (ref link). Responsive feeding involves responding to baby’s fullness and hunger cues, to ensure healthy feeding patterns. This means eye contact and distraction-free feeding sessions which can deepen the bond between caregiverand baby.
- Gastrointestinal benefits: Naturally paced feeds help prevent the conditions that cause colic-like symptoms. When babies breastfeed, they can “switch off” when full - they may stay on the breast for a non-nutritive suckle (for comfort), but they will not get more than they need.
How Emulait Stands Out
Emulait bottles are designed to mimic the breast’s shape, feel, function and flow so that baby can have the most natural feeding experience possible. Designing a bottle which encourages active suckling was a central goal. There is simply no other baby bottle which offers this feature – conventional bottle nipples are rigid and non-extendable, and are gravity-dependent, meaning the baby extracts milk through suction (like drinking through a straw). It requires little coordinated effort and the milk flows freely.
The Emulait nipple is especially pliable and stretchy. Together with our unique Responsive Flow Valve, these features allow babies to preserve the extraction skills that are often lost with bottle-feeding. This feature helps reduce the likelihood of nipple confusion or flow/teat preference, which can make incorporating a bottle into one’s feeding routine a distressing experience for both baby and mom.
The Responsive Flow Valve enables babies to pace their feeding naturally, releasing milk in coordination with the baby's suckle strength. This feature is particularly beneficial since overfeeding is one of the key contributors to the gastrointestinal discomfort that many bottle-fed babies experience. Overfeeding is directly related to a baby’s ability to manage the milk flow, which is not possible with a conventional bottle. Even if a bottle offers different flow grades, the flow is still “gravity-led”. Emulait gives control back to the baby.
Emulait’s nipple recreates the texture and mouthfeel of a natural nipple with representations of the Montgomery glands on the nipple surface and internal fibers which mimic the connective tissue behind the nipple. The bottle design allows the baby to be positioned in the most natural way possible, as if breastfeeding. This way they can maintain eye contact and communicate their hunger and fullness cues, which helps foster the personal bond of breastfeeding. This natural positioning is possible because the bottle is designed to give baby control over the flow. If they were using a conventional bottle, they would need to be semi-seated while an adult controls the flow manually.
Emulait is the first bottle company to center moms in the entire design process. In addition to engineering a bottle which emulates natural feeding, Emulait goes even further by harnessing frontline advances in scanning technology to offer customized nipples that reflect a mother’s unique anatomy. Using True Depth camera technology, the Emulait app captures the contours and data points of their nipple. For your privacy, the scan does not capture images. Our skin tone range - from fair through to rich - honors and celebrates the diversity of families. This thoughtful design evokes the familiarity of a mother’s breast, helping to reduce anxiety and ease the transition from breast to bottle.
Why Innovation Matters
Breastfeeding is an example of nature’s best technology. It remains unchanged, but the social and societal forces around it are in constant flux. This means that many mothers stop breastfeeding before the official recommendation or don't start at all, for a wide range of reasons. Return to work is one of the main reasons why mothers introduce bottles, but there are other life stressors, medical conditions and failure to thrive issues which can also influence a mom’s decision. Some moms opt out for lifestyle reasons. Modern family constellations, such as single-sex families, and adoptive or surrogate families, may not have the option of breastfeeding their child. There are many good reasons to revolutionize the baby bottle as we know it. Yet, the baby bottle industry has not kept up pace with the opportunities that innovative thinking and technology offer the world in so many fields.
At Emulait, we believe that babies and families deserve more! Babies deserve the developmental benefits that a more natural feed provides. Moms and families deserve a product which makes their feeding journey easier. Since launching in 2023, Emulait has been turning heads in the world of baby products. It’s true that you can't quite miss our bottle’s iconic design, but we have literally gone where no one has dared – bringing together science, technology and empathy to bring babies, and their families, the most natural of bottle-feeds. Most recently, Time Magazine chose Emulait as one of the most innovative products for 2024, as did the Juvenile Products Manufacturer’s Association. While we are excited that our innovative work is being recognized, we are most excited how Emulait is transforming the feeding experiences of babies, moms and their families.
