Feeding the future

Monday afternoon. A cooling breeze, a gloomy sky, and I am tired. We got married three days ago and my wife had to fly to Bangkok in the morning. I put my AirPods in, I am not in the mood for a conversation. I duck into my Grab and tell the driver I might fall asleep quickly.

He makes small talk anyway, and somehow I play ball and reply, smiling. As we cross Singapore, the conversation moves from how much a Grab driver makes, to whether that is enough to raise children, to why Singapore needs immigration to prop up its fertility rate.

I am curious. I check online. Singapore is at 0.87 in 2025, below the replacement rate, the lowest resident births in its recorded history.

I am at the age where conversations around kids keep happening. Lately the news has been full of it too: a baby-formula recall, a fight about folate and autism, a government promising to “make our children healthy again.” So when I got home, I did the thing I always do. I pulled five years of Google Trends and went looking for what the world actually wants to know about feeding its children.

And I got my first surprise.

The fewer the babies, the louder the search

Singapore barely makes babies. Yet for every child it does have, it searches about feeding them harder than almost anywhere on earth. That surprised me, so I plotted every country I could find against its fertility rate.

On first look, the countries having the most babies search breastfeeding the most, with Kenya, Indonesia, Egypt and Nigeria near the top. Then I divided each country’s interest by its actual number of births, and it inverted. Singapore rose to the top, beside Ireland, Finland and Switzerland, tiny, wealthy and barely reproducing, while India and Nigeria sank to the floor. The fewer the babies, the louder the search.

So a search graph for early-life nutrition is not a map of where children are. It is a map of where parents worry, compare and spend. Next I wanted to see it move over time and understand the broader trends.

Five steady years

I lined the same four topics up over five years, and the surprise is how little happens. Breastfeeding towers over everything and drifts gently down. Baby food holds steady. Baby formula is smaller but creeps up. Infant feeding barely registers at all.

Unsurprisingly, there is little seasonality. Strip out the trend and the one-off spikes and only breastfeeding keeps a rhythm: a mild lift each August, around World Breastfeeding Week. Formula’s apparent May peak turns out to be a single event, the 2022 shortage.

In a category that barely has a season, a sudden spike has to be something news related.

It was the news

The last twelve months were not calm at all. Three American stories swept through, one after another. In late summer 2025, the White House push to “make our children healthy again,” alongside lawsuits over how “toddler milks” are marketed. Through the autumn and winter, a run of formula recalls. In the spring, a government report linking folate to autism. The companies selling to these parents were dragged along with each one. Line the events up against the search graph and the timing is hard to miss.

What parents searched instead

In the most recent months, breastfeeding has barely moved. What surges instead is stage-specific nutrition, infant, toddler and early-childhood, off a small base, along with iron and vitamin D deficiency, children’s brain development, folic acid and children’s vitamins. What parents worry about is changing faster than how much they worry.

Watching it land

In August 2025 the White House strategy and a wave of “toddler milk” lawsuits hit, and infant and toddler nutrition jumped more than fivefold. It stepped up again in November, when the American brand ByHeart recalled every batch of its formula after dozens of babies fell ill with botulism. And it climbed a third time in the spring.

That third climb was science, or an argument about it. In spring 2026 an American policy push tied prenatal folate and acetaminophen to autism, and folic acid and prenatal vitamins went to record highs. Even the niche “breastfeeding diet” rode along.

Did the brands catch it?

All that fresh attention is a windfall, and it raises the obvious question for anyone selling into the category: do you catch the wave, with what you say or what you ship, or do you just get dragged along by it? The timeline above is really a record of those choices.

Both levers exist, but the action was mostly in the message. Bobbie was relentless: Cardi B as its “Chief Confidence Officer,” campaigns with athletes about the pressure of motherhood, a “Formula Is Food” push on ingredients. Danone went the other way, into emotional support, with a French campaign built around postpartum mental health and a 24/7 parent helpline. Product moves were quieter and more incremental: baby-food makers leaned into clean-label and heavy-metal testing as a new state law forced disclosure, and supplement brands pushed methylfolate, an active form of folate they market as cleaner than folic acid, as the folate argument put the nutrient in the spotlight. The incumbents, Abbott and Reckitt, mostly played defence, their messaging shadowed by litigation.

So did any of it move attention their way? You can read the answer off the search lines.

ByHeart is a vertical line in November, a thirtyfold jump that vanishes as fast as it came. Aptamil leaps in January, when a cereulide toxin pulled Nestlé, Danone and Lactalis products from more than sixty countries. Only Bobbie rises on purpose, climbing all through 2025 on marketing alone. One caveat: this is share of attention, not share of market, who is talked about, not who is bought. But the difference between a brand that grows and a brand that merely spikes is written right there in the lines.

What another brand can take from this

You do not have to sell formula for this insight to be useful. Any brand exposed to seasonal cycles, safety scares or shifting health stories can read these eighteen months as a playbook.

On crisis

Speed and transparency decide who keeps the customers. Regulators called ByHeart’s recall too slow. A rival’s recall spikes anxiety across the whole category, not just the brand at fault, so the brands ready with stock, search visibility and honest “here is how we test” content caught the parents it lost; the ones who paused to work it out did not. The moment is an opportunity, but only if you are ready before it arrives. The one thing never to do is feed the fear: formula marketing sits under strict codes, and reassurance has to be about your own standards, never about trashing a rival. Keep accountable and cross correct quickly.

On promotion and growth

Seasonality barely helps here. Only breastfeeding has a usable rhythm, a lift each August, so plan that one about three months ahead, from May. For everything else there is no reliable calendar to lean on. The moments that move these searches are news, not seasons, so hold budget ready for them instead.

Geography rewards tailoring. Folate and autism is an American conversation; heavy metals and clean labels, largely American too; formula recalls went global. Match the message to the worry that is live where you spend. Premium, low-fertility markets (Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and Ireland) reward ingredient science and premium positioning, because each child is a rarer, higher-value customer. America rewards agility, with budget held back for the next news moment. The high-birth markets that barely register in English need their own languages and price tiers, not a translated premium campaign.

And a spike is not growth. A recall lifts a brand for a week, then leaves; the attention is borrowed. The brand that compounds is the one, like Bobbie, building its own reasons to be searched between the shocks.

What search can, and can’t, tell you

A few honest limits.

Search is attention, not sales. The monthly geographic data is noisy at the edges, and this export has gaps, China barely registers on several topics which is to be expected since the data comes from Google and the country uses predominantly Baidu.

The science under the loudest story is disputed, so the honest posture is to report what people searched, not to judge whether they were right to.

But the bigger picture is hard to miss: fewer children are coming, across most of the wealthy world, and emphatically in Singapore. Yet every one of those rarer children now arrives into more scrutiny, more choice and more marketing than any before. The search graph is that paradox made visible: a small, shrinking subject that, for one strange and noisy year, the whole internet could not stop asking about.