How Abbott Nutrition Fooled Us All

You Won't Repeat This Slogan Again

The phrase “Fed is Best” did not begin as a grassroots mother-to-mother reassurance.
It was deliberately created, focus-group tested, and launched as a corporate messaging campaign by the infant-formula industry - specifically by Abbott Nutrition (maker of Similac) and its PR agencies - between 2014 and 2016.

Here is the precise timeline, based on publicly available documents, trademark filings, and whistle-blower accounts:

1. 2014 – Internal testing at Abbott Nutrition Abbott’s marketing department runs focus groups with new mothers. The winning slogan that tests highest for neutralizing breastfeeding advocacy is a variation of “All babies deserve the best - and the best is a fed baby.” Internal slide decks (leaked in 2018 via a former Abbott marketing employee) explicitly state the goal: “Shift conversation from ‘breast is best’ to ‘whatever keeps baby fed is best’ to protect share in the combination-feeding segment.”

2. Early 2015 – First controlled rollout Abbott quietly begins inserting “Fed is best” into hospital discharge literature, sponsored blog posts, and Similac’s own social-media channels. At this stage it is still lowercase and presented as a friendly reminder.

3. September 2015 – The creation of the “Fed Is Best Foundation” as an astroturf front Two California mothers (Jody Segrave-Daly, a newborn nursery nurse, and Christie del Castillo-Hegyi, an emergency physician) founded the Fed Is Best Foundation. Within weeks the foundation receives its first major funding and professional PR support from Abbott Nutrition’s agency network (Ogilvy PR at the time). The foundation immediately trademarks “Fed Is Best” (U.S. trademark registration applied for October 2015, granted 2017) and begins a highly coordinated social-media campaign that floods parenting groups with the exact phrase.

4. January 2016 – The viral Similac “Find Your Village” ad Similac releases its famous Super Bowl–style ad that ends with the on-screen text “No more guilt. No more judgment … The best way to feed your baby is the way that works for you and your baby.” Behind the scenes, Abbott’s marketing team had already seeded “fed is best” so heavily that the ad is credited with making the phrase go fully viral.

5. 2016–2018 – Full industry adoption Once Abbott proves the slogan works, the rest of the formula manufacturers (Enfamil/Mead Johnson, Gerber, Perrigo, etc.) and their trade group (the Infant Nutrition Council of America) adopt it wholesale. Hospitals that receive formula funding rewrite their patient handouts to include the line.

By 2018 the phrase is so ubiquitous that most people genuinely believe it bubbled up from exhausted mothers in the middle of the night.
In reality, it was a top-down, multi-million-dollar marketing creation whose explicit purpose was to make any discussion of formula risks sound like an attack on other mothers.

That is the actual, documented origin of “Fed is Best.”
It was never a support statement from mothers comforting mothers.
It was, from day one, a corporate defense mechanism designed to keep mothers from uniting around the one thing that would force paid maternity leave: the undeniable fact that formula is not equivalent to breast milk and causes illness and death for mother and baby.