Germana Carillo A playful look at New York’s latest PR stunt: “breast milk ice cream,” created by Frida and OddFellows. No human milk involved—just marketing, nostalgia, and Instagram bait.
@Frida
The company behind it has a name so overused it could have been pulled straight from a marketing cliché: Frida. And the product? A frozen dessert meant to mimic the taste of colostrum. Yes, you read that right—breast milk ice cream has officially landed in New York. But what’s really inside this curious creation?
“It’s sweet, a little salty, smooth, with hints of honey and splashes of colostrum, and it carries a distinct yellow tint reminiscent of colostrum,” explains Frida. The company, best known for its pregnancy and parenting products, has teamed up with OddFellows, an artisanal ice cream maker in Dumbo, Brooklyn, to launch this flavor at $12.99 per scoop.
And before anyone panics, no—there’s no actual human milk involved.
“Even though it isn’t made with human breast milk, we think our recipe comes close to the real taste,” the company adds with a wink.
What’s really in it?
Despite its provocative name, the breast milk ice cream is not made from real breast milk. Instead, the recipe is designed to approximate it, leaning heavily on clever marketing and food science.
The base is fairly standard: whole milk, cream, powdered skim milk, sugar, egg yolks, guar gum, and a drizzle of honey syrup. Then things take a more theatrical turn. There’s liposomal bovine colostrum—an ingredient often marketed in sports nutrition as a muscle-recovery booster—plus a splash of salted caramel flavor, a yellow food coloring to sell the illusion, and preservatives like 0.1% propylparaben. To top it off, you’ll find FD&C Red 40, better known as Allura Red AC (E129), a synthetic dye that’s been controversial in food debates for years.
So no, nothing here truly resembles the colostrum produced by a new mother’s body. That natural liquid—dense, yellow, and loaded with antibodies and antioxidants—remains one of the most valuable first foods for a newborn. What OddFellows and Frida have whipped up is, instead, a kind of edible performance piece: a mix of nostalgia, shock value, and just enough familiar flavor to keep customers comfortably anchored in caramel and vanilla.
Nostalgia as a marketing strategy
The rollout leaned into cheeky imagery. The ice cream is promoted as “just like mom used to make,” and the Dumbo shop is decorated with breast-shaped stickers. The message is playful, but it’s also calculated. In a city where you can pay $8 for “artisanal water”, the idea of breast milk ice cream fits right in.
And it worked. The product wasn’t a gastronomic breakthrough; it was a PR coup. Thousands flocked to try it, not necessarily for the flavor but for the story it allowed them to tell afterward.
Because, in the end, the taste hardly mattered. The real appeal was being able to say: “I ate breast milk ice cream.” From there, Instagram did the rest.
Source: Frida
