The following article was contributed by the author through the Global Entrepreneurship Week Story Submission Form. Interested in sharing your own? Submit your story.
Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2025’s theme—Together We Build—could not come at a more urgent time. Around the world, families are facing rising conflict, extreme weather, and systemic infrastructure failures. For infants, these breakdowns can be fatal. When safe water, power, and medical access are compromised, something as essential as infant feeding becomes a dangerous challenge.
That’s where our journey began.
I spent over a decade managing large-scale energy and government infrastructure projects. My work was focused on cost control, risk mitigation, and operational performance. But when I became a mother—and later, a caregiver for others—I began to see a gap in global readiness that no one seemed to be solving: How do we safely feed infants when all systems fail?
This question led to the creation of Callie Baby Bottle, LLC, and eventually, the invention of the Callie Baby Safe & Ready System—a patented, dual-pouch infant formula delivery system designed to work without clean water, bottles, sterilization, or refrigeration.
The product is compact, hygienic, and easy to use—even by untrained caregivers in the most extreme conditions.
From the beginning, our work has been powered by collaboration. That’s why the theme of GEW 2025—Together We Build—is more than a slogan for us. It’s the foundation of our impact strategy.
Building the Product
At Callie Baby, we’ve developed a system built for real-world, high-risk scenarios—from wildfire evacuations in California to humanitarian crises in Gaza or South Sudan. We are currently preparing for clinical studies with leading experts in pediatrics, nutrition, and food science, with early-stage funding support from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Our system is being engineered to support not just survival but dignity and nutrition equity for every child, regardless of circumstance.
Building the Mission
As the product matured, it became clear that a nonprofit arm was needed to support broader access and global deployment. That’s when Global Nutrition Readiness (GNR) was born. GNR is focused on research partnerships, field implementation, and aligning with global health networks—including those advancing WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene), maternal health, and emergency nutrition standards.
We’re now working to form alliances with organizations like UNICEF, WHO, MSF, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—to ensure that safe infant feeding becomes part of every emergency kit, refugee supply chain, and postpartum care plan in crisis-prone regions.
Building Together
None of this happens alone. Our progress has come through the power of community—mentors, scientists, engineers, health advocates, and survivors—all contributing their voice to a solution that is desperately needed but long overlooked.
Entrepreneurship is often portrayed as a solo journey, but our story is a clear reminder that true innovation happens in partnership. From field doctors helping us understand contamination risks in shelters, to mothers in urban housing insecurity showing us what simplicity really means—we are building this solution with the people it’s meant to serve.
As we celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, we invite others to join us—not just in scaling a product, but in redefining what global readiness looks like for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Together, we are not just building a company or a nonprofit—we are building a system of care that transcends borders, disasters, and inequities.
Sonia Gonzales, PhD, is the Founder/CEO of Callie Baby Bottle, LLC, and Founder of Global Nutrition Readiness (GNR). She holds a U.S. patent for the dual-pouch infant formula delivery system (U.S. Patent No. 11,667,459 B2, issued June 6, 2023), and her work is supported in part by a grant from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Learn more at www.calliebaby.com.
The opinions expressed in submitted articles are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Entrepreneurship Network.