Hi Ellen, it's a fair question which we've discussed at length. From the service side we made it a point that the truck shouldn't be parked more than a 5 minute walk from these mothers' workplaces (hence the focus on strip mall parking lots and concentrated commercial/manufacturing areas), and the entry/exist process should also be very quick (possibly via pre-registration). Breast milk pumping alone takes approximately 20 minutes and may occur 1-2 times a day (based on our research), so it's a time-consuming process with or without our presence.

As for the employers' buy-in, our team needs a better understanding of the legal framework around breaks for breastfeeding or breaks in general. If no state or corporate policies exist, we were considering pitching this as a perk businesses could offer employees; we may even entice them to subsidize part of the cost since they don't have the infrastructure themselves.

One of our pending tasks is to reach out to more businesses and users in general, as noted above. From our limited pool of knowledge, businesses' flexibility on the matter seems to be very case by case. In short, yes we have approached businesses; and no, we can't be certain.

Thanks for reaching out Guy. It's difficult to tackle this problem without a target country / community in mind. I work in international development and have become wary about clumping developing countries together as if the context was similar across the board.

That being said, working mothers with newborn children exist everywhere in the world. Our team decided to focus on the United States since the challenge wasn't explicitly location-specific. Having interviewed mothers from different cultures for this idea, however, I am confident that some version of a service that facilitates safe and hygienic breast milk pumping could prove valuable elsewhere. In our case we're building on what already works in the US. Again, each country, city, and community is distinct.