The Merage family (, ) is a wealthy Iranian Jewish family residing in

Orange County, California Orange County (officially the County of Orange; often initialized O.C.) is a county (United States), county located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in Southern California, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, the population ...

. In 2004 the Merage Jewish Community Center opened in Irvine, California; the center was named after the Merage Family and serves the needs of Orange County. David and

Paul Merage Paul Merage (born 1943) is an American billionaire businessman who co-founded Chef America Inc., the company that popularized the microwavable frozen snack Hot Pockets. In 2015, his net worth was estimated at $1.8 billion. Biography Merage was ...

co-founded

Chef America Inc. Chef America Inc. was the manufacturer of the microwavable snack Hot Pockets. Chef America is a former closely held corporation, which was formed in the late 1970s by two brothers, Paul and David Merage, of Colorado. Nestlé acquired the corp ...

where they created the popular microwavable snack

Hot Pockets Hot Pockets is an American brand of microwaveable turnovers generally containing one or more types of cheese, meat, or vegetables. Hot Pockets was founded by Chef America Inc. Since April 20, 2002, they have been produced by Nestlé. Histor ...

in the early 1980s. The brothers later sold the Chef America Inc. company to

Nestlé Nestlé S.A. ( ) is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland. It has been the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since 20 ...

for $2.6 billion. Hot Pockets were manufactured in Englewood, Colorado, Chef America's former headquarters, until moving its business to the rest of

's frozen business in

Solon, Ohio Solon ( ) is a city in southeastern Cuyahoga County, Ohio, United States. The population was 24,262 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. A suburb of Cleveland, it is part of the Cleveland metropolitan area. History In 1820, the first ...

. Paul Merage's daughter Michelle Janavs, a food executive who was at one point regarded as the Hot Pockets "heiress," was later implicated in the notorious Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and later sentenced in February 2020 to five months in prison after pleading guilty to paying

Rick Singer Operation Varsity Blues was the code name for the investigation into the 2019 criminal conspiracy scandal to influence undergraduate college admissions in the United States, admissions decisions at several top American research universities, u ...

$100,000 to fix ACT scores for her two daughters so they could be admitted into the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

References

{{reflist Iranian Jews Iranian families Jewish-American families Iranian emigrants to the United States American families of Iranian ancestry Iranian philanthropists