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Santiago Merea

September 13, 2017

Baby Food Delivery Startup Raised Real Gets $5 Million Injection

When Santiago Merea spoke at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, he was Chief Revenue Officer of Yummly. Less than a year later, he’s heading up his own baby food startup called Raised Real and just raised $5 million from frozen food and food delivery giant Schwan’s Company.

The Spoon was the first to cover Merea’s transition to his new startup, which delivers flash frozen raw ingredients for baby food. Before Raised Real, Merea was an early entrant into the smart kitchen market with Orange Chef, a company that created a connected scale and app called the Prep Pad. The company eventually got acquired by Yummly, but Merea retained the rights to the Prep Pad, which he eventually sold to Perfect Company.

When parents sign up for a Raised Real subscription, they get a mixing machine that steams and blends the ingredients into fresh baby food. A subscription, which Raised Real calls a ‘Membership,’ costs $95 and ships every two weeks. Each box includes ingredients for 20 meals, translating to $4.75 per meal.

Raised Real ingredients and food mixer

The interest from Schwan’s came after Raised Real’s early success. According to Merea, the retention rate for customers is 80% after the initial box is shipped, and 90% after the second box is shipped, which translates to about a 72% retention rate after the first month. That is an impressively low churn compared with meal kit services such as Blue Apron, which retain only about half of their customers after the first month. That number drops to about a third of customers by month three.

Merea told The Spoon the company plans on using the $5 million to expand nationally. Today the company ships in five states in the western United States: California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada.

Schwan’s is an interesting investor. The company, founded in 1952, is the $3 billion frozen food and delivery conglomerate behind such brands as Red Baron pizza and Mrs. Smith’s frozen pies. The company has its own food delivery business, which dates back to the company’s beginning when founder Marvin Schwan started delivering ice cream to homes in rural Minnesota. Schwan’s eventually expanded into other food types like frozen fish and pizza, launching their own brands like Red Baron along the way.

According to Merea, Raised Real has two days to get its food packs into a customer’s hands once it packs the flash frozen ingredients with dry ice. While this gives them access to most of the continental United States, access to Schwan’s vast delivery infrastructure could still be critical in a national rollout. Access to Schwan’s cold chain delivery expertise could be important as well, since cold food delivery is, generally, one the trickiest and most expensive types of food distribution.

There’s no doubt that going from Yummly to starting his own baby food company with a partner like Schwan’s is a big shift in just a year, but Merea explains that the idea for Raised Real came to him not long after his twins were born almost three years ago.

“I couldn’t wait for them to start eating,” said Merea, “but when I went to the grocery store all of the food was processed. I realized that all of these companies are speaking to the previous generations of parents. The current generation of parents doesn’t want processed food. They want fresh and organic.”

Merea soon started experimenting with raw ingredients, mixing his own baby food at home. He wasn’t satisfied.

“The whole supply chain behind these ingredients still needed to be solved,” he explained.

He eventually started talking about the idea for a fresh baby food startup with his eventual cofounders, Michelle Davenport (a PhD in Nutrition and registered dietician), and Steve Kontz (whom Merea worked with at Orange Chef and Yummly) and, before long, Raised Real was born.

You can listen to an adapted version of this article below, or add the Daily Spoon Alexa Skill to get Spoon articles on your Echo device. 

December 22, 2016

Perfect Company Buys Prep Pad IP From Orange Chef Founder

Perfect Company, a company specializing in smart devices for cooking and preparing food in the kitchen announced today that they have acquired the IP for the Orange Chef Prep Pad. Orange Chef, founded by Santiago Merea started out in 2011 as an iPad kitchen accessory brand. Merea recognized early on that consumers were bringing their phones and tablets into the kitchen to follow recipe videos and instructions and started by making a sleeve for iPads to help the device stay clean. Orange Chef demoed the Prep Pad at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2013, introducing the concept of a connected scale with a companion app to make cooking and following a recipe even easier.

The company has experienced a lot of change since that launch three years ago, including an acquisition by recipe discovery platform Yummly at the end of last year. After struggling to launch a line of new countertop products, 60% of Orange Chef staff joined Yummly including Merea himself, as chief revenue officer. Prior to the Yummly acquisition, Orange Chef had also faced challenges with the Prep Pad, dealing with many user complaints around app support.

Merea has since left Yummly to become a startup founder once again, this time to start a baby food company which The Spoon reported in October of this year. The company details are vague, but based on the website will likely “offer an ingredient delivery service and 10-minute prep time for fresh-from-scratch baby food at home.” Despite leaving Yummly, Merea retained the Prep Pad’s related IP including its patented technology and app. So how will Perfect Co use the acquired assets? Automated food tracking, for one.

Mike Wallace, CEO of Perfect Co responded in an email to The Spoon: “As you know we entered the health and nutrition space in 2016 with the launch of Perfect Blend™, which tracks nutrition as the user makes a blended recipe.  Food tracking is the most challenging part of using any diet solution, and we see a huge opportunity in automating this process. The Orange Chef’s patented IoT technology, which not only measures nutrition of the food you prepare, but also records the recipes you make for next time, fits in nicely.”

Perfect Company’s acquisition of the brand makes sense; the company currently offers several different versions of the connected scale and app solution, including one to prepare alcoholic beverages, one to help with blended drinks and another to assist with baking. In a market where several of the popular connected scale hardware brands have abandoned their plans, including Orange Chef and Drop Kitchen, Perfect Co seems to have figured out how to make products that thrive.

Wallace explained, “A lot of Perfect Company’s success can be attributed to the company’s DNA. Prior to entering the connected scale space, the Perfect team had successfully designed, developed and delivered to market multiple technology products in the toy industry (accounting for over $500MM in retail sales)….The ability to execute is also what is propelling Perfect’s next phase of growth.  Having successfully established a retail presence, the company is now aggressively extending its market footprint through partnerships with leading brands.”

We’ll keep an eye out in 2017 to see what becomes of the Prep Pad assets and how Perfect Company leverages them in new product offerings and partnerships.

October 20, 2016

Q&A With Raised Real’s Santiago Merea

When we broke the news this weekend that Santiago Merea had left Yummly to start a new baby food startup called Raised Real, details were a little scant, so we decided to ask the former Orange Chef CEO a few questions about his new company.

While he is still keeping some of the details of his new company under wraps, we got a few more details about his vision for the startup.

Wolf: What is the idea behind Raised Real?

Merea: We know that parents want to make their own baby food. As a matter of fact, a recent study shows that 1 in 3 parents want to make their own baby food (up from 1 in 10 only 5 years ago) and escape the processed, shelf stable alternatives. But most fail, because it takes so much time and work. We want to make a hard task, easy.

Wolf: Is it a delivery service? Does it have any connected tech?

Merea: Delivery service with a very particular supply chain. No connected tech, but there will be a baby food machine to make things easier. More details to come.

Wolf: Why baby food?

Merea: Baby food is a $55 billion global market with 3% annual growth. However, we are not planning to stop with baby food. For us, it is all about empowering parents and the relationship we build with them. On top of a baby food delivery service we are building a new digital channel that can be used to offer other products and/or services. But first things first, we are starting with the best baby food you can give your baby, the food that you make.

October 15, 2016

Yummly CRO Merea Leaves To Launch Baby Food Startup

At last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Santiago Merea found a suitor for his struggling startup Orange Chef. A week after this year’s Summit, he’s left to start a new startup focused on reinventing baby food.

According to Merea’s Linkedin profile, he’s left Yummly, the company where he was Chief Revenue Officer and which had acquired his former startup. His new job? The founder of Raised Real, a company which, according to its Linkedin description, aims to re-invent “the process of making baby food at home.”

What does that mean? It’s too soon to tell, but what I can glean from the company’s website is that it will offer an ingredient delivery service and 10-minute prep time for fresh-from-scratch baby food at home.

What’s unclear is if the at-home food assembly it will involve any home or kitchen technology. Given that Merea retained the rights to his Prep Pad, I’m intrigued to see if he applies any of the Orange Chef intellectual property towards baby food.

I’ve reached out to Merea and will update this post with info once I have it.

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