Honest MealPal review – New York Midtown
Have you ever heard of MealPal? It’s a subscription based meal plan. Subscribers can reserve/pickup the meal from the participating restaurants. Each restaurant offer the subscribers one meal each day. I’ve been subscribing MealPal lunch for about a year and am pretty enjoying it. So I’d like to share my review about MealPal.
How does it work?
Currently MealPal is offering lunch and dinner options. First, subscribers will choose how many meal you will subscribe per month, and reserve their meal while the kitchen is open. For lunch, the kitchen opens from 5pm to 10:30pm, Sunday through Thursday. For dinner, the kitchen is open Monday to Friday from 5pm to 8:30pm.
Lunch
12 Meal: Up to 12 meals per 30-day cycle, $6.39 per meal, plus tax and fees.
Dinner
10 Meal: Up to 10 meals per 30-day cycle, $6.99 per meal, plus tax and fees.
Pros
Great deal for the price
My office is in Manhattan New York, and the average price of the decent lunch is around $10-15. So, MealPal is pretty awesome deal in my office area. Personally, I do not want to spend more than $10 on lunch everyday but at the same time cooking and bringing my own lunch everyday is too much. I’m subscribing 12 meals/month plan, which means I can order 3 meals per week in average. This works perfect for me, because sometimes I’d like to go to lunch with my co-workers or bring my own lunch.
By the way. the meal quality from some restaurants are excellent, and it’s definitely worth more than $6-7. As far as my office area, variety of cuisines are available.
You can discover many different restaurants
By using MealPal, you can find many restaurants you never been to. This works great for me, as I tend to keep going to the same restaurants and order the same thing again and again and again… I found many nice restaurants and even go back to them without MealPal.
A lot of healthy choices
In Manhattan, it looks like there’re tons of healthy choices. Salads, fruits bowls, and Vegetable smoothies are great healthy choice. Popular restaurants such as Just Salad, The Little Beat, and Pure Green are participating MealPal.
Save time for food pickup
Many MealPal restaurants have a separate pickup window for MealPal, so you can skip a long line. It’s a HUGE thumb up especially when you pickup your meal at the popular restaurants during the peak time.
Great customer service
I contacted MealPal’s customer services several times in the past, and their customer service was very good. Their response time was quick and the staff was very helpful. Once I had an issue with one restaurant for meal pickup. When I arrived at the restaurant, none of the staffs had no clue what MealPal is, and they literally treated me like a crazy person. It turned out that the restaurant was just joined the MealPal, and staffs has not been informed about their new service. Anyways, I could not pickup my meal on that day and reached out to MealPal customer service. They responded quickly, treated me with respect, showed sympathy, and reimburse my meal. I was happy with their support.
Cons
Good meals are sold out instantly
Yes, it’s sold out instantly! Yes, I said instantly. I’m not even over-exaggerated. I’m very curious who are actually able to reserve those meals everyday and how! Are they on stand-by in front of the phone before the kitchen opens everyday? Or MealPal is offering VIP service, which I do not know? I’ve not still been able to figure out this mystery yet. Anyway, my point is that the popular meal goes out quickly. Make sure to reserve it as soon as the kitchen is open.
For your information, those popular restaurants meal will occasionally popup on your screen when the timing is good. I believe that’s when the regulars cancelled their meal. It tend to happen in the morning.
Depending on the area, you have small restaurant selection
I believe this all matters when you consider the subscription. Ideally, you want to be in the area where there are many participated restaurants, so that you can have more choices. Luckily to me, midtown is not so bad when it comes to the number of participated restaurants. But it looks like Midtown East has much more options than Midtown West.
You can check the list of participated restaurants from here. Before you subscribe, make sure there are enough participated restaurants around your area.
Remaining lunches cannot be carried over to the next cycle
Let’s say you have 5 more lunches left for the current cycle, but your cycle ends in 2 days. That means you will lose 3 meals. Unfortunately, the meals cannot be carried over to the next cycle. So make sure to use all of them in a current cycle. My suggestions is trying to use all meals earlier in your cycle. Unexpected thing always happens. The more meals you have towards the end of the cycle, the more the chances you will lose your meals. And believe me, it’s not fun to feel the pressure to force you order something everyday. I’d recommend to subscribe the meal plans, which is less than you think you will actually need.
If you cannot pickup the food, you will lose it
I understand unexpected thing happens. You visited your client and could not come back to your office, or you were stuck to the meeting and could not pick up the food. Unfortunately, if you’re not able to pickup your meal, you will lose it. There is no meal reimbursement system at this point.
Extra tips
Friend referral is difficult to receive
MealPal has a friend referral reward. Both referee and referrer are supposed to receive rewards. But there’re so many restrictions and actually it’s very very difficult to get the reward. My colleague tried so hard to get his reward from his legit referral. After a long painful battle, he lost. Yes it was a sad story for him. But it’s a good idea not to expect a reward from referral for a piece of mind…
Conclusion
About one year ago just after I started using MealPal, I experienced many issues for meal pickup as the participated restaurants were also new to this service. Also I remember the mobile app had some issues. When the time goes by, it looks like many things have been improved. That’s part of because many participated restaurants are also accustomed with this unique system. Also MealPal seems to be passionate about deploying updates to improve their system. I see the potential growth in this service. Overall I have a great experience with MealPal, and I’m planning to keep my subscription.
If you’re curious about MealPal, I’d recommend start with the small subscriptions. You can stop the subscription if you don’t like it. Hope you enjoy my review!
