American infant formula capacity is being expanded. That is good news and it is worth reading closely, because the largest piece of it does not address the thing that went wrong.
The biggest project on the books is Mead Johnson adding more than six hundred thousand square feet, at a cost of several hundred million dollars, to a plant it already operates in Zeeland, Michigan. Two much smaller line additions are planned in Ohio, from Bobbie Baby Incorporated and PBM Covington LLC.
What actually failed in 2022
Not national capacity. The United States had enough formula plants to feed American infants right up until the moment one of them stopped.
The 2022 shortage was a single-facility event: a plant closed, and there was almost nobody positioned to take up the volume, because the market is concentrated into a handful of manufacturers running a handful of large sites. IBISWorld counts eleven infant formula manufacturing businesses in the country. The relevant number is smaller still, since the ones with meaningful share are fewer.
That is a site count problem. Capacity and site count are different variables, and they move independently.
An expanded Michigan plant produces more formula per week than the current Michigan plant. It does not give the country a second place to get formula from if the Michigan plant is shut by a recall, a contamination finding or an inspection. Per unit of national supply, more capacity at fewer sites is a more concentrated system than the one that failed — the same volume now depends on fewer walls.
The same arithmetic, three industries this week
This desk wrote yesterday about ifosfamide, where American supply ran through one contract plant and an FDA finding of recurrent contamination therefore was the shortage rather than a warning about one. It wrote on Thursday about solar wafers, where the middle of the chain was skipped while both ends were financed.
The common structure is that redundancy is unrewarded. A second plant held at partial utilisation is a bad investment on every commercial measure — until it is the only reason anybody gets supplied. No customer pays a premium for the existence of a backup line, so no producer builds one, and the market converges on the efficient configuration, which is also the brittle one.
Formula makes this unusually stark because the product is uniquely non-substitutable and the consumer is an infant.
The entrants are the real story
Which is why the small projects deserve more attention than the large one.
Bobbie acquired the Nature's One brand in 2023 and picked up share after the Abbott recall. Kendamil has pushed into more than two thousand four hundred Target stores. Now Bobbie and PBM Covington are each adding a production line in Ohio.
That is new independent capacity at new sites, and it exists because the shortage created something an entrant almost never gets in a concentrated consumer category: shelf space. Retailers who had been unable to stock an alternative suddenly needed one, and the incumbents could not supply it.
Whether that translates into durable resilience depends on a question nobody can answer yet. A small manufacturer survives a shortage easily — demand exceeds all supply. What it has to survive is the return to normal, when the incumbents' expanded capacity comes online, the market is comfortable, and price competition resumes against a producer with a fraction of the scale.
What to watch
Not total capacity, which will be reported in tonnes and will look reassuring.
Watch the number of independent manufacturing sites producing FDA-registered infant formula for the US market, and watch the share of national volume coming from the largest single site. Those two figures describe fragility. Capacity describes output.
If site count rises and largest-site share falls, the 2022 lesson has been learned. If capacity climbs while both of those hold steady — which is what the announced pipeline currently implies, since the largest project is an expansion of an existing site — then the country has bought more formula and the same exposure, and the next single-plant failure will empty the same shelves faster.
The Mead Johnson expansion at Zeeland, Michigan, its several-hundred-million-dollar cost and the addition of more than 600,000 square feet of production space, and the two smaller Ohio line additions attributed to Bobbie Baby Incorporated and PBM Covington LLC, are as reported by Industrial Info Resources in September 2026. The count of 11 infant formula manufacturing businesses in the United States as of 2026 is from IBISWorld. Bobbie's 2023 acquisition of the Nature's One brand and its share gains following the Abbott recall, and Kendamil's expansion to more than 2,400 Target locations, are as reported in trade and company sources. The characterisation of the market as dominated by a very small number of manufacturers, such that a single facility closure leaves almost no one to take up the slack, reflects those sources and the record of the 2022 shortage. The analysis is our own.
Topics businessmanufacturingsupply chain
