MB Real Estate‘s Craig McCaw, an assistant vice president of Corporate Services, completed an 8,000-square-foot lease for food tech company, Nurture Life, in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.
The property, located at 358 W. Ontario St., is the two-year-old company’s first official office space and production location. The company specializes in organic, already prepared meals for children between 6 months old and 18 years old.
The company was founded by two former Silicon Valley tech professionals, Steven Minisini and Jennifer Chow, who both knew from personal experience that there must be a more efficient option to feeding children well-balanced, fresh meals. The subscription service provides weekly deliveries of ready-to-go meals created by an in-house culinary team, which includes a pediatric dietitian. Nurture Life customizes meals based on children’s ages and dietary preferences.
“Parents are placing a greater importance on where the food that their children consume is produced, requiring food companies to adhere to best-in-class safety practices and transparency of all product ingredients and major allergens,” Minisini said. “Nurture Life has addressed these critical concerns from day one with the build out of our state-of-the-art production facility, which was designed as an integrated supply chain from the receipt of raw ingredients to finished product, providing a safe process that families can trust.”
Each meal is constructed on site, in 
the company’s planned commercial-grade kitchen, which was an “absolute must” for the founders.
“The perfect space that Nurture Life was looking for did not exist in the marketplace. The trick was finding a space with some existing restaurant infrastructure (i.e. black iron exhaust, walk-in cooler/freezer, etc.) and then converting the restaurant seating area into open office,” McCaw said.
Minisini and Chow chose to relocate from Silicon Valley to Chicago to found Nurture life in order to ease a planned transition from a regional to a national meal delivery service. Chicago’s central location and position as a global supply chain hub meant that the firm could reach more families than if their production facility were located on either coast.
This strategy has proven to be successful, as Nurture Life now delivers to over 20 major cities that extend as far as New York, Atlanta and Dallas, with only a single production facility. The firm plans to eventually open a West Coast production facility to round out its national reach.
