President Joe Biden said it will take a couple of months for the U.S. supply of baby formula to return to normal as manufacturers work overtime to get products on shelves.
Biden convened a roundtable of formula executives and members of his administration on Wednesday for an update on the nationwide shortage.
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“I ask you that you keep focused, stay focused, stay in high gear. We can’t let up in the infant formula market until it’s all the way back to normal. And that’s going to take a couple more months, but we’re making significant progress,” Biden said.
Executives from major infant formula manufacturers claimed progress in getting more supplies on shelves in recent weeks, citing the benefits that Biden invoking the Defense Production Act have conferred on companies sourcing materials to make and distribute the formula.
Absent from the roundtable was a representative from Abbott Nutrition, the company that oversees the shuttered Sturgis, Michigan, plant. Abbott has fallen under intense scrutiny over the past few months since its voluntary recall in February of certain contaminated formulas, and the subsequent closure of one of its major U.S. plants exacerbated a brewing shortage. The plant is slated to reopen on June 4, provided the Food and Drug Administration approves it. In the meantime, other formula executives said they are prepared to fill the gap in the market that Abbott left behind.
Abbott said it will supercharge production once the plant is permitted to reopen but warned that it could take six to eight weeks before the product is available on shelves.
Robert Cleveland, a high-level executive at Reckitt, said that his company’s plants are running around the clock and speeding up distribution of its formula Enfamil to partner retailers such as Target and Walmart “because it’s not just about more, it’s about how much more we can put on a shelf.”
“Since the beginning of the year, we have been able to increase the amount we’ve put to market by over 30% and to do it 40% faster,” Cleveland told the panel. “That’s about 211,000 more infants that we’re feeding after the recall than before the recall.”
The baby formula market in the United States is highly concentrated. Four manufacturers dominate about 90% of the market. Abbott had a 40% market share in the U.S. before the recall, and its Sturgis facility produced 40% of the company’s U.S. formula supply. While other manufacturers said they suspected a devastating shortage was coming as soon as the recall was announced, Biden told reporters he did not see the full magnitude of the shortage until early April.
Since then, the administration has launched Operation Fly Formula, an initiative to airlift infant formula to the U.S. from suppliers abroad that abide by the FDA’s health and safety standards. Biden announced on Wednesday that his administration had reached a deal with United Airlines to transport the equivalent of 3.7 million 8-ounce bottles of Kendamil formula free of charge from Heathrow Airport in London to multiple airports across the U.S. over a three-week period starting on June 9. The first shipment will be available at Target stores across the country “in the coming weeks.” The administration is also bringing in approximately 4.6 million 8-ounce bottles of Bubs Australia infant formulas from Melbourne, Australia, to Pennsylvania and California on June 9 and June 11, respectively.
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The Biden administration has been criticized for its sluggish response to the shortage, as well as mixed messaging from officials about when exactly they noticed that a shortage was brewing. A whistleblower at Abbott voiced concerns to the FDA last fall about unsanitary conditions in the plant, but the report never made it to agency leadership as a result of what the agency called “an isolated failure in FDA’s mailroom” due to COVID-19-related staff absences. The agency did not inspect the plant until late January, however, “due to an ongoing COVID-19 outbreak among its staff.”
