RealEats CEO Unpacks Vision After $16M Series A Funding

Meal delivery service RealEats recently secured $16 million in Series A funding.

The round was backed by Hamilton Lane, on behalf of the New York Common Retirement Fund, GNC Holdings, Armory Square Ventures, and Excell Partners.

In learning more about how RealEats is making it simple for people to enjoy the nutritional benefits of real food, Benzinga spoke with Dan Wise, the company's founder and CEO.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Q: Hi Dan. Nice to meet you! Can you kick off this conversation with some background?

A: I started off right out of college, buying and selling excess inventories for the world’s largest wholesale distributor, at the time, of closeout products.

I then found a way to make the industry less fragmented and more efficient through automation.

I started what became the first-ever business-to-business marketplace for excess inventory called LiquidXS. I had a great run with that and exited the company in 2007.

Where did the idea behind RealEats come from?

I found myself, later, as a busy single dad with two young boys, and I was really hesitant to keep feeding them our go-to meal solution, which was restaurant delivery.

I tried meal kit companies for a little bit when they launched.

I really applaud them for creating a solution that brings people back to the kitchen, cooking fresh, healthy ingredients to make a meal, but also recognizing that it took a little while — 60 minutes or so — to do the cooking, the eating and then the cleanup afterward.

One day, a chef friend of mine showed up at my office with a vacuum-sealed bag of lamb chops.

The vacuum seal would lock in the flavor, freshness and nutrition without any preservatives, keeping the product fresh for about 13 days. That would help control inventory and food waste.

I thought this was a great way of solving this sort of healthy, easy dilemma and we ended up launching RealEats — a prototype or beta version — in Montreal, Canada.

I later bought him out of this concept and ended up launching with a new set of people in upstate New York, in a place called Geneva, in the heart of the Finger Lakes agricultural region.

What were some of the biggest challenges you encountered?

Finding a kitchen that would be certified to produce product safely in any region, and then be able to ship it to consumers directly in other regions.

In our kitchen search, we came across a really big opportunity.

I had applied for the START-UP NY program, a tax deferral program that incentivizes companies to move to New York.

I applied to 50 different academic institutions that were facilitating the program. Two of them wrote me back. One was Finger Lakes Community College and one was Cornell’s AgriTech center in Geneva, New York.

After showing [Cornell] our way to make it simple for people to enjoy the nutrition of real food, they accepted the proposal and provided a kitchen and some grant money.

Tell me about raising money. How did that happen?

We’ve been through a series of different capital raises.

The first one started with a friends and family round back in 2017. It was a small round and we started raising convertible notes in a subsequent round, ultimately converting into what became our seed, which was July of 2020.

Recently, we completed our Series A, which was a $16.3-million capital raise led by Hamilton Lane Advisors, on behalf of the New York Common Retirement Fund, along with Armory Square Ventures GNC, the global health and wellness retailer, and others.

How does the fundraising process look like?

We kicked off the Series A almost a year, or nine months or so ago, before we finalized the entire capital raise.

In regards to GNC, they tried our product and the decision to invest was made based on how delicious our product was.

They got involved and have been incredibly strategic for us in the sense that we just launched on GNC.com. They’re now offering our meals to their customers who are all high-intent health and wellness consumers looking to improve their health, but easier nutrition.

What are you most excited about going forward?

We’re really excited about what we have accomplished to date and having a strategic distribution partner like GNC and financial partners like Armory Square, Hamilton Lane, Excell Partners and some of the others that have invested in us.

It’s just an opportunity to amplify our progress and to, quite frankly, feed a whole lot more people real, healthy food. So, we’re going to be doing this across different channels with different types of products.

One of the products that we’re launching soon will be very unique in the meal delivery space.

It will provide the ultimate in personalization and customization of meals to our customers in a way that we do not believe anyone else in the space can achieve.

Any last comments?

I think what motivates our entire company is that we’re truly creating a positive impact on human health, and we’re doing this by making it simple for people to enjoy the nutritional benefits.