Best Breastmilk Bags

My Favorite Way to Freeze Milk

• What: Lansinoh Breastmilk Storage Bags
• When: Birth to weaning
• Why: Store breastmilk
• Where: Amazon

I used Lansinoh Breastmilk Storage Bags exclusively for my pumped milk. I never tried another brand because I never needed anything else. A friend gave me her leftover supply of bags after she stopped pumping, and I reordered the same brand every time I needed more.

I used two bags a day, one for each side, and combined my pumping for the day (as previously mentioned, with my first two kids, I rarely pumped more than 2 ounces total during any session), usually the next morning. Once I transferred milk from the pumping bottles to the bag, I froze them.

I loved that these bags stood up on their own when filled with milk. That made pouring much simpler. When I defrosted milk to use, I poured milk from the edge of the bag where the two sides formed a V shape to direct the flow into the bottle for my child.

I put them in the freezer laying down, so the bags froze into flatter shapes more easily stored in bulk. But it took me a kid or two to learn that trick (and also I didn’t have as much milk to freeze until our third child). I felt good about laying them on their side because of the double zip closure. I used the edge of the counter to get the air out of the bag before sealing it closed.

We never had any milk go bad, though I did find one bag in the bottom of the freezer several years later. It hadn’t spilled but I tossed it anyway since we no longer need pumped milk and it had passed the point for safe donation. We used the oldest milk first, and tracked what we had using Total Baby LINK, though until my third child I didn’t have much of a cushion between the date we used and the date I pumped the milk. With my abundant supply the third time around, we had tons of time in between but never an issue with milk going bad in the bags. (Milk stored in the fridge after being defrosted more than 24 hours or milk left in the fridge without being frozen for a week? That’s a different story.)

I used a pen to label each bag in the appointed spots with the date and amount. Because I didn’t pump at work and had zero risk of confusing my bags with anyone else’s, I didn’t need to add my name, but these bags provide room for that as well. I always found it interesting that the measurements on the sides of the bags didn’t always exactly match the measurements on the sides of the pumping bottles, but I had better things to do with my time, like sleep, rather than investigate further.

We dropped several (alright, at least one full container of twenty plus bags) on our hard basement floor from the freezer. Not a one of them broke. And though I kept those bags segregated and watched for leaks from small holes or abrasions during defrosting, we didn’t run into that either.

Other brands might offer the same features, but I never tried them. Lansinoh Breastmilk Storage Bags did the trick for me and I would highly recommend them for storing breastmilk under any conditions.