finally tonight a uniquely New Jersey story of a couple who discovered their baby refused to drink breast milk after it had been frozen due to changes in the taste and smell so using their ingenuity Katie and Justin Sily invented a way to fix it and have since built an entire company dedicated to studying the science of breast milk raven Santana has their story and I was starting to go back to work and my husband was starting to try and feed the milk and he's like "What is this what What's wrong with your milk?"

Cuz he had never heard of this before after Katie and Justin Silie welcomed their second child Katie returned to work while Justin took over the responsibility of feeding their baby using Katie's frozen breast milk but time and time again their daughter refused to drink it though they weren't the only parents dealing with babies rejecting frozen breast milk likely due to changes in taste and smell they couldn't find a solution we've done surveys and around 90% of women who breastfeed at any given time end up freezing some sort of milk and I think around 70% of the women notice a change in taste and smell in the milk so this is normal you don't typically put any dairy item in the freezer without doing something to it right so our milk we drink is pasteurized yogurt's pasteurized um but breast milk is going in the freezer with having nothing being done to it um so Justin came up with a solution to essentially add into the milk to prevent the chemical changes from happening which is why Justin decided to investigate further in turn creating pumpkin a platform dedicated to breast milk science he brought a sample of Katie's breast milk to a lab where he discovered that freezing not only altered the texture and flavor but also diminished the milk's nutritional value the approach we've taken is how do you stabilize that emulsion so that uh the structural integrity is better maintained in the freezer determined to solve the problem Justin began researching thousands of food-based additives that could preserve both the taste and nutritional content of the milk after extensive testing he identified a combination of natural infant safe ingredients that when added to fresh breast milk could maintain its flavor and nutritional value after freezing it he says he was able to create both powder and liquid forms of the additive it is a set of ingredients that when added to freshly expressed breast milk uh the parent can then put that milk into the freezer just as they do today but the milk will be better preserved um the ingredients themselves are all the way that we're developing it today at least uh are all going to be or are fruit/veable derived these are ingredients that are found or known to be highly abundant in uh infants first foods already things like pea purees and apple purees and things like that justin and fellow scientists Anelie Shawing gave me a tour of the Princeton Innovation Center biolabs where all the magic happens here they are perfecting the breast milk additive using a breast milk analyzer uh so the milk analyzer is pretty cool um it takes about max like 2 minutes to actually analyze the milk yeah it's really fast um all it does is it sucks up the milk and then there's like cool physics that goes on in here and it basically analyzes the macronutrients in the milk like fat protein content and a lot of other punch like bunch of cool stuff the pumpkin team recently received a grant from the state's economic development authority this funding will support the ongoing research and development of their product through the state's maternal and infant health R&D grant program a portion will be going to one of the company's collaborators Integrated Chemistry Services LLC which is providing these test strips to be packaged along with the breast milk additive so parents can determine whether their milk is healthy and viable basically we are creating a chemistry solution that that can rapidly determine um different analytes and in breast milk and and basically it informs the the mother in real time um and the nutritional value of of um of what they're giving to their kids the Silies explained that because human milk varies greatly between individuals and across different ages the goal is to gather as many diverse samples as possible they are currently seeking just over a 100 donated breast milk samples to help finalize their product before putting it to market for NJ Spotlight News I'm Raven Santana