Going to put on my analyst hat for a moment. Baby formula is one of those things that they don't make a lot of excess. Since it has an expiration date, they'd have to throw it away. Therefore they don't have factories large enough to make excess production. The factories are "just big enough". The rate of birth and the amount that they manufacture is in lockstep, and it doesn't change much year to year. If there is a baby boom, they will know about it (9 months ahead of time) and it gives them time to ramp up production by hiring extra workers and running a night shift or something. There is also a supply chain of materials: everything from the containers and lids, to the milk powder and extra vitamins and chemicals that are added to make the formula. All of these things are somewhat complicated, but it comes down to the shortage of one individual item being able to shut down an entire brand name. Say you ran a factory to make chocolate chip cookies. If you suddenly couldn't get baking powder, you'd have to shutter the entire plant. Since baby formula is very heavily regulated, you can't change the recipe and run to another baking powder manufacturer for supplies. It takes months of paperwork. Everything in the formula has to be FDA certified since it is for babies. That means that lining up a third party is difficult and time consuming. Since you are shooting to meet the minimum FDA requirements of vitamins and nutrients, you can't just leave out your missing ingredient. Note that this isn't what happened this time. I was using that as an example of something that could go wrong. What really went wrong is that one large manufacturer (who makes about half of the baby formula in the US) had an incident where some bad ingredients were sent out in the mix. Bacteria or some such... I haven't researched it. This shut down the whole factory, they scrubbed everything, they dumped a lot of their precursor ingredients, and they had to recall and destroy a lot of their finished product. Since they don't have any excess, there is a shortage. Since they don't have the ability to instantaneously increase their manufacturing, there will continue to be a shortage for a while. (Remember, they have to order their ingredients ahead of time and also hire and train people for the night shift.) Since it is a heavily regulated area by the FDA, they can't import it from any other country. This all comes down to globalization and the "just in time" (JIT) manufacturing technique. They don't stockpile years worth of anything anymore. You have a few days/weeks of supplies on the shelf, and that's it. You run "thin" and your profit margins are higher because you don't have spoilage and you don't have to pay for extra space in your warehouse. There are a lot of dominoes that have to fall exactly right in order for JIT to work correctly. If even one of them fails, the whole system stops working.