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Meet Raised Real—Making Homemade Baby Food Really Easy

Written by Katie Hintz-Zambrano

Photography by Photos Courtesy of Raised Real

Want to serve your baby fresh, homemade food, but struggle to find the time to actually do it yourself? Brand-new company Raised Real has got you.

Founded by Michelle Davenport, Phd, RD, and mother of a 22-month-old, and former Orange Chef CEO Santiago Merea, also a dad to 2 1/2-year-old twins, Raised Real was born out of the duo’s mutual frustration as busy parents looking for healthy, homemade food for their tots.

“While getting my PhD, I trained at some of the world’s best medical institutions, but at home, I struggled to make baby food for my daughter,” explains Davenport, pictured above. “Being a mom showed me how rough it is to be a modern day parent. At the end of a hard day, all you want is the comfort of knowing that what your baby eats will nourish and support their development. It took me a whole year of research and 8 years of training to make a handful of perfect baby food recipes. By contrast, most parents have less than an hour of free time every night. It shouldn’t be that way.”

Armed with the knowledge that roughly one in three parents are currently making their own baby food in order to combat the processed versions on grocery store shelves, the two created the Raised Real subscription service, which delivers organically sourced, preservative-free, raw ingredients that are flash-frozen at their peak nutrition and served up in combos (designed by Davenport) that are equal parts healthy and yummy.

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“We wanted to create recipes that both taste great and focus on areas of development for each stage in a baby’s life,” says Davenport, who planned the meal combos based on cutting-edge nutrition science. Her blends include broccoli with green beans, chickpeas, avocado, and flaxseed; chickpea with cauliflower, tahini, and turmeric; and sweet potato, mango, coconut milk, lucuma powder, and ground chia, among several others.

Since micronutrients play a key role in recipe creation, each delivery includes cards highlighting the specific nutrients found in the meals, and what they aid—from eyes and brain, to immunity and digestion. Older kids can also eat the creations, steamed and served up as finger food.

The pre-portioned meals—20 are delivered bi-weekly for $4.75 per meal and no delivery fee—just need to be steamed and blended (Raised Real makes this part extra simple with its all-in-one Meal Maker) and served, eliminating the more laborious process of buying one’s own produce, peeling and dicing it, steaming and blending it, and freezing it into smaller batches.

Interested? Raised Real is currently shipping nationally. Find out more about the service and sign up over at RaisedReal.com.

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This post is brought to you by Mother + Raised Real

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