Mayo woman listed with Time magazine’s 2025 Women of the Year

Mayo woman Laura Modi, who heads one of America’s leading infant formula companies, has been listed as one of Time magazine’s Women of the Year 2025.

Ms Modi, the daughter of Portwest owners Owen and Karen Hughes, was among 13 women described as ‘extraordinary leaders’ who are ‘working toward a better, more equal world’.

She is the founder of Bobbie, an infant formula manufacturing company which does not use additives like high fructose corn syrup or palm oil in its products. 

After starting in Portwest, Ms Modi moved to America in 2008 and worked in high-profile positions in Google and Airbnb before founding Bobbie in 2018. The company’s products are aimed at mothers who are unable to breastfeed their babies. 

Ms Modi was partly inspired to set up the company when she could not find baby formula free of unhealthy ingredients while suffering with mastitis.

Within eighteen months of launching in January 2021, the company had raised over $100 million in revenue. It has nourished more than 4.5 percent of babies born in the US and is positioned to serve three times as many babies in the coming years.

In 2022, the company halted new subscriptions during a nationwide baby formula shortage to ensure their existing customers continued to receive formula. 

The company’s social impact and policy arm, Bobbie for Change, which lobbies for parental leave and gives free formula to mothers who have had mastectomies. Bobbie also provided free formula to people who lost their homes during the Los Angeles Wildfires earlier this year. 

“I didn’t get into this because I like making powdered milk,” Ms Modi said. “Becoming a parent makes you an activist.”

In an interview earlier this year, Ms Modi cited her upbringing in an entrepreneurial family. 

“It’s baked into your DNA from the very beginning. I think there was an element of wanting to start a business or knowing I would start a business that always was baked into my belief from very early on,” she told the ‘Behind Her Empire’ podcast.