It started with a bleary-eyed Google search: “Sell breast milk.” Desiree Espinoza had a 2-month-old baby girl but was pumping out enough milk to feed triplets. Ziplock baggies full of the stuff were crammed in her freezer, and unpaid bills crowded her kitchen table. She wasn’t sure there was a market for her overflow or whether selling it was even legal. A few clicks later, she found herself on a website called Only the Breast.

The site looks a lot like craigslist, except instead of selling used cars and like-new Ikea furniture, Only the Breast deals in human breast milk. There are hundreds of posts from new mothers eager to turn their surplus into profits. Many kick off with a chirpy headline (“Chubby baby milk machine!”), then follow with a snapshot of their own robust infant and lush descriptions (“rich, creamy breast milk!” “fresh and fatty!”), making a primal source of nutrition sound like a New York cheesecake. The posts are additionally categorized to appeal to a variety of milk seekers, based on a baby’s age (from 0 to 12 months), say, or special dietary restrictions (dairy- and gluten-free). There’s also a sort of “anything goes” section for women willing to sell to men. Some ship coolers of frozen milk packed in dry ice. Others deal locally, meeting in cafés to exchange cash for commodity. The asking price on Only the Breast runs $1 to $2.50 an ounce. (A 6-month-old baby consumes about 30 ounces a day.)

Intrigued, Espinoza tapped out her sales pitch: “Mostly organic raised breast milk. I have over 500 oz saved and I need to get rid of it. During the week I only eat organic.” A few days later, she was in business, selling the milk at $2 an ounce to a couple of customers in the Phoenix area where she lives, including a mother with a newborn and a man who claimed breast milk helped his immune disorder. “There’s no way I could get a job with an infant, so this helps pay for diapers and clothes,” she says. In three months, the 19-year-old college student earned enough to buy a new laptop and the dress she wore to her wedding to the baby’s 22-year-old father, a recent college grad. She plans to continue selling for a year, and if she can pump a steady 30 ounces a day, she could take in about $20,000.

Only the Breast represents just one facet of the emerging market in human milk. In an era when the benefits of breast milk are better understood and more scientifically certain than ever, demand for it has created a niche industry. Besides sites like Only the Breast, that demand is being met by a handful of all-volunteer women’s groups that help organize free milk donations via Facebook and their own websites. Two prominent ones, Human Milk 4 Human Babies and Eats on Feets (a play on Meals on Wheels), connect thousands of women, facilitating the donation of raw or home-pasteurized milk to new moms in need.

There’s also a well-established brick-and-mortar network of so-called milk banks. These nonprofit operations collect milk from donors and process and pasteurize it to meet certain quality and safety standards. The milk is sold mostly to hospitals and parents of sick or premature infants at around $4 an ounce. A newer player is Prolacta Bioscience, a for-profit enterprise that operates somewhat like a pharmaceutical company, with a large-scale plant in Southern California. Prolacta produces its own enhanced breast-milk product, a syrupy fortifier specifically for hospitalized newborns, at a cost of $135 per baby, per day. With 58 hospital contracts and an ambitious distribution strategy for the next year, Prolacta envisions a multimillion-dollar opportunity for its products.

Most body fluids, tissues, and organs—semen, blood, livers, kidneys—are highly regulated by government authorities. But not breast milk. It’s considered a food, so it’s legal to swap, buy, or sell it nearly everywhere in the US. This accounts, in part, for the widely varying quality and safety standards in the online market for milk. For their part, Prolacta and nonprofit milk banks have rigorous screening processes for potential donors, including tests for drugs, hepatitis, and HIV. But Only the Breast and the volunteer sites, which see themselves more as communities than commodity markets, don’t screen donors or assume responsibility for the milk they help disseminate.

Whatever the source of the milk or its channel of distribution, the trend is clear: Human milk is being bought, sold, donated—and gratefully received—on an unprecedented scale. And as demand grows, the competition for every ounce is getting more fierce.

The overall benefit of feeding babies breast milk instead of formula has been well established. In 2007, the US Department of Health and Human Services issued a report showing that babies who are formula-fed instead of breast-fed are at an increased risk for asthma, acute ear infections, diarrhea, and SIDS. ¹ The advantages of feeding breast milk to babies are touted by some to be lifelong, potentially lowering the odds of obesity and boosting IQ by as much as 5 points.

Researchers have only recently begun to identify the mechanisms underlying breast milk’s powerful effects. Look at it through a microscope and you can see that breast milk is abuzz with white blood cells, pearly fat globules, and fuzzy balls of protein. At higher magnification, you can make out the millions of Y-shaped molecules that are an infant’s primary defense against infection: antibodies. Produced by the mother’s immune system in response to the pathogens in her environment, these antibodies are passed along to the baby to fight off illness. Mothers’ milk has other protective properties and potential uses as well. Sugars called oligosaccharides, long thought to have no function, since infants can’t digest them, are now known to adhere to a baby’s intestinal lining, allowing good bacteria in while repelling harmful bugs, like a discerning bouncer at a hip club. Fatty acids called DHA and AA serve as brain food, stimulating neurological development. One fatty acid-protein hybrid nicknamed Hamlet (Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor Cells) has been found to kill 40 different types of cancer cell lines in the lab and is being researched as a treatment for patients. Breast milk also contains a host of stem cells. While scientists don’t know yet what they’re doing there, researchers suspect they may have the ability to differentiate into disease-fighting agents and could one day be harvested to treat an array of ailments, thus sidestepping the ethical concerns of harvesting stem cells from human embryos.

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