Are baby bottle prep machines safe to use?

Currently, bottle prep machines are not recommended by the FSAI.

If you choose to feed your baby formula, making up bottles can be time consuming and quite annoying, especially for those midnight feeds. With a fussy newborn, feeds are already exhausting and you may naturally look to anything to try make your life easier, so a bottle prep machine looks promising, right?

If you’ve attended our FREE Baby Care Workshop, you’d already know that there are unsafe baby products flooding the market. In fact, HSE has warned against using these convenient machines as they have not been proven to be safe. Bottle prep machines state that the water is dispensed at the right temperature to give to your baby straight away. This seems very handy but this means the water has never been boiled and sterilised. The bottle prep machines do not get the water to a high enough temperature to kill all the bacteria in the formula. The best way to prepare formula is by boiling the kettle and waiting at least 20 minutes for it to cool, this way any harmful bacteria have been killed and the water has cooled down to just the right temperature for your baby!