MilkMate Founder Patrice Meagher On Scaling Lactation Services in the Workplace

It was as a broker for CBRE (CBRE) in 2010 that Patrice Meagher figured out her calling.

She had had the first of her four children — a boy — and while she dearly wanted to breast-feed her child, there was no place for her to lactate.

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The company was hardly a hostile place for new mothers. CBRE then offered a wellness room that could be made private, and in general was in line with best practices at the time. But Meagher still had to lug her pumping equipment to work. 

Eventually, she would devise the concept behind MilkMate, a company that not only advises firms on how to provide its female employees with a private space to pump, but also provides the right equipment, including a comfortable chair, a place to rest your arm, and a refrigerator in which to store milk. In this day and age of workers increasingly finding reasons not to commute into the office, it’s one more amenity to keep staff on the farm.

Back then, when Meagher was breastfeeding her newborn son, there were no laws such as the bipartisan-supported PUMP Act of 2023, which amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to require employers to provide reasonable break time and a private place to pump — a space that was not a bathroom, mind you. 

But the practicalities of setting up something that complies with the law and that employees will use remains elusive. That’s where MilkMate comes in.

Meagher took some time at her Third Avenue office in Midtown to explain to Commercial Observer how the firm goes about it. The interview took place in a conference room with views of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and other towers where actual and potential clients reside, as well as a sample setup for the chair, refrigerator and other necessary accouterments. (By the way: CBRE itself is now a MilkMate client, too.) 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: What is the basic pitch for MilkMate?

Patrice Meagher: Our mission is to empower working moms and the employers that support them. So we typically like to focus on what it looks like to pump at work. A lot of times people aren’t really talking about pumping in the workplace because it is a sensitive subject. 

On average, new moms need to pump about three to four times per day, which is every two to three hours. It’s recommended by the American Society of Pediatrics for women to breastfeed for up to two years. But this can vary depending on preference and the ease of breast-pumping at work. So, when women leave their babies, in order to keep their milk supply, we help if they do need to pump when they return to the workplace.

We are not anti-formula. We’re pro-mom. But there’s a lot of outside pressure to at least try breastfeeding, and then you’ve got this pressure when you return to work to be productive at work, be productive at home, and then add this inefficient process to your work schedule.

On the family benefit side, 60 percent of employees have left or considered leaving their companies because of inadequate family benefits and support. This is especially true after COVID. Essentially, companies with lactation support programs see a 94 percent retention rate of moms compared to the national average of 59 percent.

Quick background on me is I worked in the commercial real estate industry for about 20 years. I spent five years on the ownership side in Philly before I moved to New York and joined CBRE. My specialty was representing landlords. And the reason I tell you that is that I very much understand the way that landlords think, tenants think — return-to-work initiatives, regulations, wellness, amenities, cost of construction. That’s my real estate professional brain.

On the personal side: While I was there, I had four kids, I breast-fed all my kids. So that means, when I returned to work, I needed to pump in order to keep my supply up. Before I had my first son, there were no laws in place.

The Affordable Care Act didn’t pass till 2010, so for many women throughout the country, everywhere, there weren’t really adequate places to pump until that law passed. But, in addition to pumping in the workplace, it’s important to have a comfortable place to do it. We always say that having a room only solves half the problem, because it’s all about packing up your supplies in the morning, cleaning them, bringing them to work with you, assembling all the parts, de-assembling, and bringing them home — because if you forget one, you can’t actually pump. It’s very inefficient to make it work. And, you know, there’s a lot of repercussions, because you don’t pump throughout the day.

We are looking to elevate the whole experience. The way we started was really as a pumping parts company. My idea was that I wanted to make it possible so the woman never had to bring anything with her at all in order to pump in the workplace.

What if, in order to have a cup of coffee at work, you had to pack up your coffee maker in the morning, you had to bring it to work with you, walk down the hallway, go into a closet, take your clothes off, set up the coffee maker, brew the coffee? But, if you forget the filter for the coffee beans, you can’t actually brew the coffee.

And now, by the way, you have to brew the coffee three or four more times throughout the rest of the day, and then bring the coffee maker and the supplies home with you. That’s basically the steps you take in order to pump at work.

We were trying to eliminate many of those steps and give women back time. We designed a pump that is multi-user, high performance, cleared by the FDA. I call it a work-grade pump, so that when a woman comes in, it’s as easy and efficient as possible. The biggest innovation by far for anyone who’s ever pumped at work is that our parts — all the parts that are associated with pumping — come pre-assembled, pre-sterilized, ready for immediate use, eliminating the woman having to bring anything with her at all.

Overwhelmingly, we have thousands of HR directors, real estate providers, facilities providers, operations folks that we interact with on a daily basis. And what we heard, “Yes, we know we need to do this, we know it’s the law, but we’re not sure if we’re doing it the right way. Can you help us to elevate the experience?” So that’s how we evolved into a service.

How much market penetration do you have?

We received FDA clearance in March 2023. We set up three locations within a few months of getting that clearance, and we are now in 53 locations in 11 states. And we do have the ability to be completely nationwide.

I take that’s only a fraction of what you intend it to be.

Yeah. We want to be completely nationwide — international, eventually, of course. We want to be in every place of work, right? So we’re not just talking about traditional office space. We just are installing the college campus in September. [Milkmate is working with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth this fall.] We’re talking to a lot of educational facilities, hospitals, hotels, casinos. We just did our first install and manufacturing plant, another at a redistribution center. We’re looking to make it into every workplace in America.

One of the interesting things you just said was that you are in hospitals, hotels and casinos, which says that you’re actually going beyond the workplace.

There’s always a need in those places, but our main focus is on the workplace. There’s regulations that they have to abide by, so we’ve just been super focused on the workplace. The majority of our installations aren’t traditional office space. And I always do this looking at the window of demand. There’s 425 million square feet of space in Manhattan. So there’s a lot of office space to tackle here. 

But it seems that you have identified a need that goes beyond the corporation, that you actually see a need for a woman who would like to take a vacation.

That would be amazing if a hotel provided that as an amenity for someone who’s staying there. Currently, the hotels that we’re talking to are looking to do it for their own employees, which I think is amazing. The idea that a mom could come to a hospital and be able to pump would be amazing, too. There’s a need for pumping locations everywhere.

In Europe, there’s already a company, Medela, that is doing this, and you get the feeling that maybe they are far ahead of us in the U.S.

There are not many companies over there that are doing business to business. We’re the full solution. We never leave their side. There’s no other organization that’s doing it this way. Medela is an at-home company. They are the biggest breast-pump company in the world.

They are located in some workplaces, but not the same way as this service.

So, basically, you see a hole that you guys could fill.

Totally. The market is huge. We’re in all different industries. We’re in real estate, we’re in beauty, retail. We’re in financial services, legal, education, agencies, nonprofits. And the idea is that lactation solutions within the workplace have gotten better, but there’s so much more you can do.

Like the fact that we make it possible for women to bring nothing with them at all — our pre-assembled precedent, right? It’s a total game-changer for these women, and the return on investment is more productivity for the team, more productivity at home, return-to-work initiatives, regulation compliance, and FDA-approved products.

We are going to be building our software to provide many more resources for working parents. We’re starting with the at-work pumping problem. I always say: How do you make the life of a working mom work?

So you plan to take it beyond the pump?

Right now, we do education and marketing. We provide tutorial videos, we have customer service lines. The most inefficient thing I ever did at work was pumping, right? And so we’re tackling that pumping problem first. 

But we love providing additional educational resources for women so you know how to prepare to come back to the workplace when you’re going to be pumping within the workplace. We’re really trying to educate as much as possible. There’s an education gap for the employers and for the women as well.

Do you have a sense of how many square feet of a workplace needs to be devoted to this? And, of course, the need to be private?

That definitely goes without saying. We don’t require a certain amount of space. We’ve done all different types of installations and sizes. We’ve done small rooms, we’ve done lactation suites, we’ve done big rooms. We basically take the place of real estate, and we advise on what you should install based on what your real estate looks like.

So a distribution center would be very different from a traditional office. We’ve done built space, we’ve done space that’s under construction right now. We did a high-end financial firm. They already had a fridge in place, some storage, but they didn’t really have a great chair, so we replaced the chair. We provided a recycling cart, and some additional storage.

As a former commercial real estate person, you must be painfully aware of the crisis in real estate, and that a lot of workplaces find themselves with excess offices. I would think that part of your pitch might be that this is a way to keep employees that you might otherwise lose. How has that changed your planning?

People ask me that all the time: “Are you happy that you developed what the service is today?” After COVID, 100 percent. Because not only are we an amazing user experience, but we are a return-to-work initiative, we’re a recruiting initiative, we’re a regulation initiative, and we’re a retention initiative.

There are a lot of organizations that are full time, but, even if they’re hybrid, even if you work one day within the office, it’s a huge benefit, and actually helps bring employees back to the office. If you talk to working parents that have young children, this gives them a way to be more productive at work.

When you talk about teachers or hospital workers or manufacturing workers, they don’t really have the option to not be in person. And we’re helping all those folks.

What do you charge? Is this a money-making operation?

The market potential is unbelievable. Pricing is done in two ways. One is a one-time-only fee for installation, onboarding and education, and that depends on the type of furniture we install. There is a range for that. Then there is a servicing fee. And the servicing fee is based on usage, the size of the company, and the customer experience. We have seven tiers of servicing for that.

Our one-time installation ranges anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 per solution. And our servicing on average is $5,000 annually, but it changes on the basis of the space.

Do you ever foresee a time when this becomes so normalized that the need for consultancies such as yours might go away?

Our relationship is forever. We don’t leave when we install. We do all the virtual training when women come back to work. We provide education. We really don’t look to go anywhere. We’re providing impact reports all the time.

The market is huge. I hope it becomes very normalized, that not only is there a room — because that only solves part of the problem — but that we are providing as many tangible tools as possible to make the life of the working parent work.