Baby formula shortage taking a toll in Texas
Houston and San Antonio are among the U.S. cities seeing less on stores shelves; a recall and supply chain shortages are cited
Estefania Chapa, 20, has looked all over San Antonio the past several weeks trying desperately to find baby formula for her 5-month-old daughter, Rosali.
Rosali was born prematurely, and Chapa couldn’t supply as much breast milk as she would have liked, so Rosali’s pediatrician recommended a special formula for her to be able to grow. The formula was working great, and Rosali was growing strong.
But in early April, Chapa began noticing her formula was harder and harder to come by.
“We go to six, eight, 10 stores in a day, and we can’t find anything,” she said. “Sometimes we’ll go back to the same stores multiple times to see if they got a new shipment in.”
Chapa and little Rosali are not alone. Thanks to a major recall involving the most popular maker of baby formula, combined with existing supply chain shortages, thousands of mothers in the San Antonio metro area and the United States as a whole are struggling to feed their babies.
And while the problem is nationwide, grocery research company Datasembly found that San Antonio has the highest percentage of out-of-stock shelves of any metro area in the country. Fifty-six percent of shelves in the region were out of stock as of mid-April, the company said after analyzing more than 11,000 baby formula sellers.
Houston was among a dozen cities with out-of-stock rates higher than 40 percent.
Abbott Nutrition’s plant in Michigan makes the three most popular and widely used brands of baby formula: Similac, Alimentum and EleCare. The formula-maker voluntarily recalled all its products in February after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found that a rare bacteria in some of its powder formula caused four infants to get sick, killing two of them.
“While Abbott’s testing of finished product detected no pathogens, we are taking action by recalling the powder formula manufactured in this facility with an expiration of April 1, 2022, or later,” the company said in a news release announcing the recall.
An FDA investigation released in March revealed that the Michigan plant was found to have an unsanitary manufacturing environment in multiple instances.
Upon learning of the recall, pediatrician Subhashini Valavalkar with the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio took all samples of Abbott formulas off her shelves and alerted all her patients’ mothers that the formula should not be consumed. Valavalkar, like pediatricians across the nation, then began the task of helping mothers figure out what to do in the event that they couldn’t find the specific formula they needed for their baby.
She said she had to switch mothers who were using Abbott formulas to brands such as Enfamil or Goodstart. But that led to supply shortages of those brands, too, as more mothers were buying them, and now all formula is hard to find.
No one knows when the shortage might end, but moms are doing everything they can in the meantime to make sure their babies have the food they need.
Kelli Whitley’s 4-month-old son Parker tried nine different formulas before he found one that he could tolerate.
Whitley, 28, lives in Victoria and has traveled and called all over South and Central Texas looking for formula since the shortage began.
Not being able to find the only food that her son can eat “makes me sick to my stomach,” Whitley said. “It’s a hard feeling to describe, not knowing where my kid’s meals are going to come from.”
Stores from Corpus Christi so San Antonio are “completely wiped out” of any formula. She said that at first, she thought that only the special formula her son needed was out of stock, so she sent her husband into an H-E-B last month to find some hypoallergenic formula that could tide Parker over until his special formula came back in stock.
Her husband called her from the store and said there was nothing on the shelves.
“He was like, ‘We’ve got to feed him, we have nothing to give him,’” she said. That’s when Whitley realized “how bad the shortage really was.”