When Eliza Larson was a new mom, it was summertime in Tucson, Arizona. Spending a lot of time outdoors wasn’t an option in the sweltering heat, so she would take her newborn son to Target. “That was the place I could go to have air-conditioning and just get out of the house,” she remembers. “I have vivid memories of just walking the aisles.”
Little did she know that years later when she walked the aisles of Target, she’d see her own products staring back at her.
It was after her second son was born that Larson, now based in Ballard, started thinking about how she could improve her breastfeeding experience. “I always struggled with milk supply. It never came naturally to me,” she says. “I had no idea that there were different foods and things that could support milk supply; it was just something I didn’t know about. And then once I found out there were different ingredients you could use, and foods that can really support milk supply, like brewer’s yeast, I got really curious about what I could make.”
(While galactagogues—that’s the fancy name for a substance that promotes the flow of milk—have not been well studied by the scientific community, more than half of breastfeeding mothers in the United States use them.)
Larson had a background in recipe development and food photography, so she was up to the challenge of creating something that would taste good and get the milk flowing, too. “On the market at the time, there wasn’t a lot to choose from. It was really just lactation cookies and medicinal-tasting teas that I didn’t particularly like,” she says.
Because Larson herself was breastfeeding, she was the perfect guinea pig for both taste and effectiveness. After 60 or so iterations, she and her then–business partner landed on the recipe for a lactation granola bar they loved. And thus in 2015, Oat Mama was born.
What began with granola bars has expanded into a line of products that also includes protein powders, greens, and other supplements.
One of her early customers was Leslie Green, who lives in Lake Forest Park and discovered Oat Mama products at a conference in San Francisco while she was breastfeeding. “I just loved the bars; I hadn’t really found a bar that tasted that good,” she remembers.
The business grew mainly via word of mouth, and quickly developed a loyal following through social media. At first, Larson and her team made thousands of bars by hand in a home kitchen (a recipe, sadly, for carpal tunnel syndrome). They moved to a commercial kitchen and then expanded to a warehouse space where nine bakers were hand-making close to 20,000 bars a month. Larson eventually moved production to a manufacturer, but it didn’t go to plan. “I was really naive at the time, just thinking it could taste exactly like we wanted it to or exactly like our original recipe,” she remembers. “It ended up being a total flop, and it didn’t taste anything like the bar we originally had. That was a really hard lesson, because we were just still bootstrapping everything, and it was a really expensive endeavor to even go to a manufacturer.”
Fortunately, Larson was later able to find a manufacturer who could adhere more closely to the original formula, and she launched that bar in 1,700 Target stores last year. “It was really special because it was what started Oat Mama, so it was kind of full circle to see it back 10 years later on the shelf,” she says. Larson had put the retailer’s logo on her vision board back in 2019, and she still has the now-tattered paper.
Along the way, Oat Mama has added products that support every trimester, from morning sickness, labor prep, and postpartum healing teas to protein powder, greens, and supplements. Given that individual bodies react differently to different ingredients, she wanted to have a wide array of products so that there was something effective for everyone.
In 2020, Larson and her husband and three sons moved to Seattle on a whim, after visiting on a road trip. “We got an Airbnb in Ballard in this really adorable Tudor home,” she says. “It had this cherry tree out front that had thousands of ripe cherries on it, and everything was so lush. The flowers were all blooming, and there were herbs growing everywhere in their garden. It was just like, ‘What is this place?’ It was so magical.”
In the Northwest, she’s been able to cultivate a supportive network, including Green—whom she met serendipitously through an automated marketing email that connected them. “It is always special when you like a product, but you usually don’t have any context around who’s creating it,” Green says. “It was validating and inspiring to meet the person behind the brand.”
When the two first met on a walk around Green Lake, Green was dreaming up an idea of her own to help moms—a water bottle that would make it easy to visualize how much water they were drinking. “I was always dehydrated, especially when I was breastfeeding,” she says. That idea led to Bink, a line of drinkware that, in a happy coincidence, also launched in Target last year.
The entrepreneurs have bonded over their shared mission to support others in a similar position. “It did feel, especially when we were having kids, that women weren’t always catered to,” Green says. “Taking care of yourself is really hard as a mom, and both of us came to this same conclusion of ‘what do I actually need and how can I make this better for other women?’”
Washington state has plans in the works to make life better for new moms, too. A bill signed into law last year—which will go into effect in 2027—will require employers, no matter the size, to pay employees for lactation breaks (in addition to meal and rest breaks already required); ensure access to a private, non-bathroom space to pump; and cover travel time to get to a lactation space if there isn’t one nearby. Current federal law does not require lactation breaks to be paid.
This year, Larson hopes to expand the Oat Mama product line to include support for other stages of life, like perimenopause, but she’ll never forget her roots. “Our bread and butter and our real focus is nurturing that new mom,” she says. “Every product that comes out is something that I always wanted.”
Haley Shapley is the wellness columnist for Seattle Met. She’s the author of Strong Like Her: A Celebration of Rule Breakers, History Makers, and Unstoppable Athletes and the forthcoming Night Owl: Staying Up Late in a World Built for Early Birds.