Santiago Merea

Founder Raised Real

A native of Argentina, for the past decade Santiago Merea has been reimagining the way things are done in the kitchen. With his first product, Chef Sleeve, a simple plastic protector for the iPad, he began to challenge the mindset around tech in the kitchen. Chef Sleeve quickly became Orange Chef, one of the first IoT companies with the introduction of Prep Pad, a bluetooth food scale that provided nutritional transparency and empowered people to have more control over nutrition. In 2014, cooking database Yummly acquired Orange Chef, the same year Santiago and his wife welcomed identical twin boys, Nico and Sebastian. Shocked at the options available in the grocery store when it came time to introduce solid food to the twins, he and his wife, both working parents, set out to prepare all of the baby food on their own. After spending an entire weekend batch cooking, Santiago learned two things: steaming beets stains everything, and there had to be a better way for parents to feed their kids.  So he set out to streamline the process through the inception of Raised Real. Fast forward to 2019, Raised Real has shipped over half a million organically-sourced, baby-ready meals nationwide in its first year on the market.