Meet Mia Funt | Co-Founder & President of ByHeart

We had the good fortune of connecting with Mia Funt and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mia, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
When I had my firstborn, Neve, I found my feeding journey to be rockier than I had anticipated. As any parent will tell you, raising a newborn is full of twists, turns, detours—you name it. But when it came to feeding, I had my plan laid out and thought breastfeeding would be a breeze (spoiler alert: it was not). I quickly found myself needing to use formula to feed my daughter, and didn’t even know where to begin. After asking friends, surveying the shelf of my local grocery store, and sifting through online product recommendations, I realized that any formula I found ultimately required me to make a compromise—there wasn’t a formula available with quality ingredients or proven benefits that also did not have fillers like corn syrup, soy, palm oil or GMOs. I felt frustrated and discouraged by the options available to me and knew something had to change.

At the time, my brother (and future Co-Founder), Ron, was working in the life sciences space, and was similarly disappointed by the lack of progress happening in the category. There was so much research being done as it related to infant nutrition, but so few of these discoveries were making it into the infant formulas found on shelves. We were both frustrated by the industry’s lack of progress and took it upon ourselves to do something about it. Together, we sought out to create a new infant formula that didn’t make parents compromise on nutrition, quality standards, ingredients or clinically proven benefits—ultimately, we wanted to create a formula that helps parents feel confident about their feeding decisions.

What should our readers know about your business?
We built our company by continuously asking ‘why?’ Why did all US-made infant formulas have skim milk instead of whole milk? Why had there not been a new infant formula manufacturer in the country in 15 years? Why do all easy-to-digest formulas have corn syrup, soy or palm oil? Why are parents forced to make such significant compromises when it comes to their baby’s nutrition? Our questions were often met with answers that just weren’t acceptable to us, and we committed ourselves to asking ‘why’ until we could find a way to create meaningful change for parents and their babies.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
It might sound cliche, but we’d be nowhere without our team. It was so important to us from day one to build a team of people who were not only passionate about their jobs but passionate about the category. ByHeart’s vision is to build a future where all parents can feel amazing about feeding, no matter how they do it—needless to say, this is not a small (or light) task! In order to build a product that makes meaningful change in parents’ lives, it’s crucial that the team believes in it. But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding —one of my favorite moments as a founder is finding out that someone from the team or a family member is using ByHeart for their baby. It means so much to Ron and I that our team not only gets to build our product, but use it too—just like we both got to for our own kids.

Website: https://byheart.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/byheart/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/byheartnutrition/