Rua Food: Feeding the mums who are busy feeding the babies
Alice Tevlin, Rua Foods' owner and head chef. Picture: Ruth Calder-Potts
“Breastfeeding is a very individual experience,” says Alice Tevlin, the owner of Dublin-based Rua Food, a bakery which supplies cafés and individuals with gluten-free and dairy-free snack options like brownies, cookies, bites, and bars.
Her experience feeding her baby led her to develop a nutrient-dense cookie designed to help nursing mothers. Tevlin’s delicious plant-based oat chocolate chip cookies include ingredients known as galactagogues, which are foods or herbs that may help to increase breast milk production. While limited scientific studies have been done on proving their efficacy, these galactagogues are ingredients traditionally consumed for their milk-making properties.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that babies should be breastfed exclusively for the first six months of their lives due to the health benefits it brings to both babies and mothers. However, according to WHO World Health Statistics from 2013, only 15% of children in Ireland are exclusively breastfed for those first six months — the global average is 38%.
Our eldest daughter was born in 2009, causing a seismic shift in our lives as we tried to figure out how to care for this tiny, squawking bundle. Before we left CUMH, the midwives there showed us how breastfeeding is supposed to work. But it’s not until you return home, with the milk arriving a few days after the birth, that you realise just how many extra questions need answering. Fortunately, we had access to a wonderful community midwife who was an invaluable source of advice and assistance.
Babies are hard work, no matter how you feed them, but the fact that breasts are portable, always there and never distribute milk at the wrong temperature meant that they beat bottles for me every time. It wasn’t always easy or simple but it was, mostly, effective. There were ups (not having to stumble downstairs in the middle of the night to make a bottle, an always-available portable milk supply) and downs (cracked nipples, swollen breasts, a constant nagging wondering if she was getting enough nourishment). But overall it was a successful experiment that I continued until she was 11 months and resumed when her younger sister was born a couple of years later.
In those early sleep-deprived, bewildered days, my midwife recommended that I infuse fennel, aniseed and caraway seeds into a tea that might help milk production. I tried it but hated the tea. As I was already making bread a few times a week in my bread machine — easier than leaving the house to buy it — I started adding the seeds into the dough. Those fragrant, herbal loaves became the basis of breakfast and lunch every day, especially good toasted and eaten with protein-rich eggs — another midwife recommendation — from the hens that we kept in the garden.
Did the bread help my milk production? I’ll never know for sure, but I did feel better for eating a delicious, wholesome loaf packed with nutritious ingredients.
Tevlin first encountered 'lactation cookies' in America when she visited her sister, who was returning to work after having her baby and needed to keep her milk supply going: “I went to visit my sister in the States in 2021. She was back at work just six weeks after having her baby. She was buying lactation cookies from Target and telling me I needed to make them.”
Back in Ireland, the penny dropped after she had her baby, a boy called Kitt. Suddenly, Tevlin was juggling the demands of returning to work while trying to continue breastfeeding. “I started developing them [the cookies] with him on my front in the carrier,” she says.
Tevlin began her career in food by doing the Ballymaloe 12-week certificate course in 2014, subsequently getting experience in Dublin’s Chapter One and working in restaurants while travelling in Australia. On her return to Ireland, she set up Rua Food in 2018, gradually focusing on producing healthy snacks for cafés during the pandemic. Wanting to create something gluten-free and vegan, she produced a delicious cookie that included Irish oats, brewer’s yeast, and linseed, all ingredients identified as galactagogues. With iron-rich oats, high levels of vitamins and minerals in brewer’s yeast, and omega-3 fatty acids from the linseed, they’re also far more nutritious than a regular biscuit.
“We make lovely healthy oaty treats, and I wanted these cookies to be the tastiest, healthiest and most nutritious that a sweet thing could be,” she says. “We use Irish ingredients and Irish companies where we can,” she says.
This doesn’t come cheap: the cookies, ordered in five boxes, cost €13. Often people buy them as gifts: “What we’re finding in the bakery is that people are buying them for their friends who are having babies.”
For Tevlin, the thank you messages on Instagram and 4am re-orders from mums mean a lot. “You only know about motherhood when you become a mother,” she says.
“With breastfeeding especially, you feel so vulnerable, but if I can help in any way, that’s a positive thing.”
