PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY DE MEZA
After graduating from Miami University, Santiago Meza was at a crossroads. He’d gotten a job offer and moved to a bigger city, where he was working as analyst, but he was unsure if he was on the right track.
“I was like, ‘do I really want to be doing this?’” he recalls. “’Am I really creating something meaningful? Because if there’s a moment to do it, it’s now.’”
With this in mind, Meza decided to return to Greater Cincinnati and help at his family’s restaurant, El Caporal, which has locations in Mason and Liberty Township and is owned by his father and uncle Santiago and Pedro. He realized that queso was the eatery’s most popular product, yet when he went to the store, he couldn’t find anything similar.
“The only options out there are the packaged ones where they have all kinds of gums and fillers,” he explains. “Is this the kind of stuff we want to be eating? I’m not against genetically modified food because we have been doing that for centuries, right? But the thing with that is they often modify it not necessarily to make it better, and these chemicals are a little iffy. You don’t know the consequences, so I thought, let’s try and make something where it doesn’t have that, where you’re happy to sit down at the table and share it with family.”
That’s when he began crafting De Meza as a queso brand with clean ingredients and sustainability as its priority. “Everything we make here, we make it from scratch,” he notes. “We buy the raw ingredients and craft the recipe based on what people like.”
Even the packaging for De Meza queso comes in a glass jar with a bamboo lid so that customers won’t be so quick to toss it in the trash once they’re done with it. Meza believes that the best form of recycling is making something that can be repurposed.
However, this would be the easy part of creating the brand, next came trying to get his products on shelves. “That’s where you start knocking on a lot of doors, and not too many answer at first,” Meza says.
PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY DE MEZA
But everything changed with a chance encounter with a Dorothy Lane Market employee at El Caporal’s bar, who offered to pass along some samples to higher-ups at the company. Soon after, he received a call, and the queso was granted a spot on DLM shelves. “Once that first door opens, the rest just kind of follows suit,” Meza recalls.
De Meza is now in about 20 stores, including Kramer’s Market in Crescent Springs, several locations in Cleveland, and nearly every independent market in Greater Cincinnati. They’re also rolling out to more locations this fall, including Lucky’s, Dave’s, and Mustard Seed, with a major pitch meeting coming up at Target headquarters in Minneapolis. Out of more than 200 brands, only a few, including De Meza, were selected to pitch. “When I filled out that application, I put my heart and soul into it,” he says.
As the company expands, so does the product. In addition to its original flavor, De Meza offers a street corn flavor, and a new spicy version is coming soon. Meza wants to preserve the quality and flavor that made the restaurant queso a hit, even if that means extra work to meet requirements for gluten-free or non-GMO certification. “Getting all that documentation is tough,” he says. “Sometimes you even have to prove how the cows are fed.”
Though tough, Meza knows that is the cost of keeping the integrity of the brand: “We want to make something that should exist. Something you’re happy to eat and proud to serve to the people you love.”
(De Meza also donates 1 percent of revenue to charitable and environmental causes. “If we’re not willing to put our money where our mouth is, then why are we even in this?” Meza says.)
As De Meza queso continues to grow, Meza remains focused on quality, sustainability, and community. “The goal is to be in 100 stores by the end of the year, and 1,000 within a few years,” he says. “But most important is creating something meaningful, something that brings people together.”
