Silcotech and Momtech to reduce stress for mothers and their babies

Bolton, ONT – Anyone who has ever fed a baby can tell you it’s not necessarily easy, especially when baby is transitioning from breastfeeding to bottle feeding.

In 2011, inventor Carr Lane Quackenbush set out to simplify the breast-to-bottle transition in partnership with serial entrepreneur Hal Eason, CEO and co-founder of Momtech, a company dedicated to providing revolutionary new products for mothers and their babies. Their efforts led to the 2023 arrival of mōmi baby nipples on the market and a much easier experience for babies making the breast-to-bottle transition.

Eason is quick to point out that this game-changing device was born of game-changing liquid silicone rubber processing brought to the table by the LSR experts at Canada’s Silcotech. Led by president and co-founder Michael Maloney, who proved a true believer in the mōmi nipple concept, Silcotech provided a textbook example of what it takes to achieve a successful collaboration.

“We could never have gotten where we are without a true spirit of partnership with Michael and his team,” said Eason. “Michael was personally involved, working through challenge after challenge, optimization after optimization. It’s hard to find that kind of true partnership.”

The mōmi journey began with Quackenbush, former president of a leading breast pump manufacturer, “retiring” to his personal workshop where he spent 10 years designing and prototyping baby bottle nipples that could simulate the natural contours and function of a woman’s breast.

After six iterations of design and testing with small numbers of babies, Quackenbush approached Eason with a version he believed was market-ready. He even had a development partner in mind: Silcotech.

“Carr Lane already had a relationship with Silcotech and a lot of confidence in them, so the decision to move forward wasn’t hard,” said Eason, who was also drawn to Maloney’s entrepreneurial love of a challenge. “As simple as this product looks, it’s the first of its kind in the market and presented a number of design challenges. It was not a slam dunk. In fact, Silcotech was the only company we found willing even to take it on.”

The mōmi nipple is rooted in the principle that nature is the gold standard of design and that current baby bottle technology is different from nature to a point where breastfed babies will either refuse to take a bottle or refuse to return to the breast should breastfeeding need to be interrupted.

“Every conventional nipple on the market is hollow, and that’s not natural,” Eason explained. “The fundamental differentiator of our product is that it has a solid soft silicone tip that resembles human tissue, enabling the baby to use the same oral mechanics whether being fed from the bottle or the breast.”

Silcotech was invaluable in navigating the various hurdles en route to success, starting with ensuring product safety.

“You’re dealing with humans in their most dynamic development, with cells dividing at crazy rates, so safety is a huge piece of the puzzle, from the materials used to the way the materials interact with the breastmilk put into the bottle,” said Silcotech’s Maloney. “It’s a highly regulated space, all focused on the ultimate effect on the baby. And then there are mechanical considerations, as well, such as the fact that babies eventually develop teeth. You have to make sure that when biting down on the nipple, the baby doesn’t break off a chunk that becomes a choking hazard.”

The effort to meet all the challenges set before the team led to a product that mixed three different types of LSR, a mixing process at which Silcotech is a leading expert.

“Implementing multiple materials within a single device was the only path we saw at the time to get the part to meet both the functional expectation and the safety requirements in creating a nipple that emulated more natural breast behavior – allowing a baby to control the flow of milk through the duct,” Maloney explained.

The three-material Gen 1 mōmi nipple proved a big success for the company, resulting in enthusiastic praise from users along with encouraging suggestions on how to make the product even better.

The continuing process of production and response is both rewarding and fascinating for Maloney and the Silcotech team. “Product design is an iterative process. You need to develop a product to get out there in the market to see how they react, hear the feedback, and then stay on your feet and move with whatever that feedback is. Our evolution went down that path and, as we learned, we were able to strip away some functionally that we thought we needed that we didn’t, and it was all based on true feedback from the field and genuine physical testing.”

“We found out that the geometry of the Gen 1 nipple, while getting its intended job done very well, led to suboptimal oral function for some babies,” said Eason. “In Gen 2, we were able to adjust the geometry while also reducing the number of LSRs used from three to one. We’re looking forward to even more improvement in Gen 3.”

While all of the adjustments made along the way seem matter-of-fact in hindsight, the road wasn’t uniformly smooth. Echoing Thomas Edison’s sentiments about the importance of discovering what doesn’t work on the path to discovering what does, Maloney said, “The acceptance of failure and the ability to fail fast is critical, because the reality is that success requires iterations of failure. The more often you can fail the more likely you are to succeed. Don’t get bogged down by bumps in the road as you’re traveling to your path of success.”

Maloney’s level of self-awareness and flexibility is much appreciated by his mōmi partners, and something Eason recommends to other companies seeking collaborators.

“Carr Lane likes to use the term ‘ego stable’ when talking about great partners,” said Eason. “You really need people around the table who can take a huge disappointment and instead of finger-pointing, blaming and getting angry – displaying all sorts of dysfunctional behaviors – simply dive immediately into solving for the disappointment, seeking alternatives.” Eason went on to describe Maloney as just that kind of presence. “I’ve seen Michael many times diffuse a tense situation that could’ve gone down a bad path. That sort of ability engenders trust—and trust is the essential foundation for success in a collaboration.”

Expounding on the benefits of a good personality mix, Eason added, “You have to have the right people in the boat. There are programs that we’ve walked away from because of character and integrity issues.”

The Momtech/Silcotech collaboration has been a shining example of how to successfully manage multiple creative minds to bring a product to fruition after the invariable multiple rounds of design iterations. As a result, mōmi baby nipples are helping many thousands of mothers and babies enjoy a stress-free transition between breastfeeding and bottle feeding.