MilkMate: One Rye Resident’s Crusade to Support Breastfeeding Employees in the Workplace

When Rye resident Patrice Meagher had her first baby in 2009, New York state laws didn’t mandate workplaces to have designated areas for working parents to pump.

She began breastfeeding her baby as an infant, and continued even after she returned to work as a commercial real estate broker in 2010. But pumping her breast milk at the office proved easier said than done.

“It was very difficult to pump at work in general,” Meagher, now a mother of four, said. “I didn’t make it very long pumping because it was so cumbersome and inefficient.”

Between all the steps involved in the task and not having a designated pumping space, Meagher recalled gawking at the inefficiencies of the overall process. She described packing the breast pump parts, bringing them to work, sterilizing them, assembling them, pumping, breaking down the parts, storing the milk, and repeating that a few more times each day.

She and her coworkers would oftentimes pump in storage closets, an office if one was available, or even while sitting in a bathroom stall.

“There are a lot of minutes and time spent on this, and as a working parent I became obsessed by efficiencies,” Meagher said. “There is an extreme amount of steps that go into it.”

Creating a system to alleviate some of the stress of breast pumping at the office, she said, is where the idea for her Manhattan-based company MilkMate was born.

A construction-free workplace lactation room, MilkMate is one of the only products of its kind.

It’s a multi-user pumping space fully equipped with an FDA-cleared breast pump and pre-sterilized and pre-assembled recyclable breast shield kits. The rooms also feature modular furniture to enhance the space – including a pumping chair, a milk storage fridge, a recycle bin, and more.

“We wanted to make it possible for a woman to bring absolutely nothing with her in order to pump at work and that’s what we’ve done,” Meagher said. “But the inspiration was really about helping other working moms.” 

By the time Meagher’s other three babies came along in the mid-2010s, state laws for pumping employees had come a long way.

In New York, it’s mandatory that every public and private business provides employees with a fully private lactation space, regardless of the size or nature of the business.

Medical guidance suggests breast pumping parents mimic their baby’s feeding schedule to maintain their milk supply, since breastfeeding is a natural supply-and-demand process. That equates to pumping eight to 12 times each day, or on average once every three hours.

For working parents, that can mean pumping around three times a day at the office.

Last year, New York’s labor laws for lactating workers expanded even further – requiring additional 30-minute paid breaks for employees to breast pump at work, separate from other paid break and/or meal time.

MilkMate really kicked off in 2020 when Meagher received full FDA medical device clearance. As of mid-March, the company has installed more than 100 lactation rooms in 18 different states.

MilkMate also announced its first school partnership with Sacred Heart Greenwich back in January, which has also provided students of the prep school the opportunity to work with the company to check inventory and onboard new users.

Meagher said her business is growing as well; by the end of the year, she hopes to double her full-time staff – from seven employees to 15.

“What I’m most proud of is my team,” she said. “Hiring is the hardest thing you can do especially when you’re mission driven and you want everyone to feel the same passion that you do.

“And I am in 100 percent belief that we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for the founding team.”

But while it’s still a relatively new company, Meagher emphasized the concept has been in the works for more than a decade, while she was the working mom of young infants – who are now 15, 13, 11, and 8.

“I still had to walk up three flights of stairs through a whole bullpen of men just to realize I forgot a [breast pump] part,” she remembers. “It would be a whole domino effect of issues – now I’m leaking milk, now I’m late for a meeting… .”

She noted the drip effect goes up the chain of command, too. By saving pumping employees 15 minutes per session and some of the mental load that comes with being a working parent, it helps the whole team’s efficiency and the retention and advancement of women in the workplace.

“Our feeling is that this benefit is not just for the women that are using it, it’s helping the entire workforce, essentially,” she said.

Earlier this month the team celebrated International Women’s Day, but Meagher wants to be clear that at MilkMate, they don’t just celebrate on March 8.

“We’ve been celebrating all week, but we also like to say that we are advocating for working women every day,” she said.

Before work a few weeks ago, Meagher took a five-mile walk around Rye. She’s only been in town for two years, but she said she’s felt engrained in the community for over a decade, after she and her family moved to Port Chester in 2014.

Before moving to Westchester she lived in New York City for seven years. She now commutes back into midtown, where the MilkMate offices are located.

Especially as a working mom, Meagher said Rye has everything her family needs.

“It’s been a great community,” she said. “If you leave the city as a commuting, working mom you want a community that you feel really comfortable with, and it’s been an amazing place for my family and I to live.”