If you’re not one of those organised and determined people who bring a packed lunch in to work with them, lunch in the City (and indeed, anywhere in central London) can be expensive. Where I am, just around the corner from the Gherkin, it’s hard to find a good lunch for less than a fiver, and very easy indeed to spend £8-10 without trying. Even pegging it at a conservative £6 a day that’s £30 a week, £120 a month, over a grand a year! Eek!
And even though there are a thousand places within a 10 minute walk, it seems like there are a million and one office workers looking to buy lunch in them, making for lengthy queues even in those with the fastest turnaround times.
Enter MealPal, an idea that has already proven itself in New York (and several other cities across the US) and has recently launched here in London. I’d already heard a few whispers about it when I came across a post by fellow blogger and friend Tiki Chris, and was happy to use his link for a free trial. Several people in my office signed up too and in that first week, we were all quickly impressed with the range of choices available near our office, the value of buying lunches this way, and the convenience of being able to skip those pesky queues.
How does it work?
Members buy a meal plan of either 12 or 20 meals to use within 30 days of purchase. At a cost of either £4.39 or £4.79 per meal (depending on how many you buy), these units can be used to buy meals on any weekday, from any of the participating restaurants and cafes in London.
The “kitchen” (MealPal terminology for their ordering interface) opens between 5pm and 9.30 am for users to browse, select and reserve their meal for the following lunch. If you change your mind within this time window, you can cancel your reserved meal (and book a different one if you like, or not). Be aware that if you cancel a meal after 9.30, you will still be charged for it, as your confirmed order has been sent through to the restaurant.
(1) Narrow in on options near your office by landmark, address or postcode (2) Use Portion and Cuisine filters to narrow down the search results (3) If you’ve saved favourite vendors, show only these in your results (4) Click on a marker in the map to check which vendor it is and what’s on offer (5) Click on a photo of a dish to read more about it (6) reserve your chosen meal by selecting a pickup time
When your time slot comes around, simply turn up at the restaurant, bypass the queue and ask at the till to collect your MealPal. In most cases it will be ready and waiting, or it will be finished off for you immediately where it needs to be made fresh. You’ll be done and out of the door again within minutes, if not seconds.
Walter and Monty; by 12:30 the queue is stretching right out of the door so it’s a huge benefit to walk straight past it to the till
In terms of choice, the way it works is that each participating restaurant proposes a single dish as their MealPal offering for the day. Most offer a different choice every day of the week, so if you don’t like what they list one day, it’s worth checking again the next to see what’s on the menu.
Breakfast & Burgers; their burgers and hotdogs (which both come with fries) are perfect for when you’re craving something delicious and filling
If you’re not a fussy eater and enjoy lots of variety, you’ll be delighted with plenty of choice for vegetarians, pescetarians and omnivores, including lighter and more substantial options. That said, if you are a bit of a picky eater, do note that you can’t request changes to the dishes, even if it’s just a case of leaving something out.
You can also influence the dishes Mealpal shows you first by editing your preferences – Vegetarian or Meat Eater, Healthy Only or Everything, Small, Medium or Large Portions and then a fairly long list of ingredients to mark as Dislike, Sometimes and Like.
What’s the verdict?
Excellent! In my office, several of those who used the free trial have signed up on a paid basis, and it’s become a daily conversation to find out what everyone has chosen for the day. The reaction to dishes ordered has been very positive.
Cafe Cotto; large paninis filled with a generously sized chicken escalope with mozzarella and mushrooms, a packet of crisps is also included
With a dodgy ankle for the last several weeks, I’ve stuck to restaurants within 5 minutes’ walk of my office, and have already discovered a few favourites. Breakfast & Burgers do really excellent burgers (as their name suggests) but also fantastic hotdogs, both served with perfect fries; they also offer a large selection of hot sauces, ketchups and mayos that you can squirt into little takeaway pots if you are a chip dipper!
I adore Walter & Monty’s salad boxes featuring a mix of really delicious salads and pickles topped with really good quality, perfectly grilled beef, lamb, chicken or halloumi; the salad boxes are ready and waiting but the meat or cheese is added hot and fresh to the box when you come in to collect it.
Café Cotto is a super friendly local sandwich bar and I’m a big fan of their large grilled paninis filled with chicken escalope, mushrooms and mozzarella or fat juicy meatballs in a tomato sauce, and you get a packet of crisps included too.
Offerings from Chilango, Crushh, Farmer Js and K10 have also been popular amongst my colleagues; I’m hoping to try more of these in the coming weeks.
Walter and Monty; your salad box is ready and waiting but the meat is sliced fresh and hot onto the salad box, ready in less than a minute; picanha beef, grilled chicken, lamb
Everyone is enthusiastic about the great value of paying less than £5 for meals that we know cost around £6 to £8 normally.
There are a handful of minor niggles.
There’s an app available for mobiles but only if you have an iPhone. Android users can only access MealPal via the web, which seems surprising given that they’ve already been running successfully in the United States for over a year.
Participating restaurants place a limit on the numbers of orders they will accept per day (perfectly reasonable, so they can ensure they are able to fulfil all the meals reserved with them) and in some cases, that limit is reached long before the Kitchen closes to reservations. That’s not been a big issue so far, as there have only been one or two items that are sold out for those reserving their lunch in the last half an hour or so, but it’ll be interesting to see how MealPal copes with increased take up of the service. They will presumably need to sign up more restaurants or increase the number of meals each one caters per day, to ensure sufficient choice for customers.
If a meeting overruns and you realise you won’t be able to make your chosen pick up slot, there is no mechanism to advise the restaurant that you will be late for pick up and to switch to a later slot. I’ve not yet investigated whether or not the meal would still be waiting if you arrive half an hour late or whether it would have been binned as uncollected.
If you don’t use all your units within your allotted cycle (of 30 days), you lose them and effectively end up paying more per meal on the ones you did have during that cycle. One of my colleagues is just coming to the end of his first paid cycle and unexpected meetings out of the office mean he’s wasted three of his units, making the cost per meal £5.17 rather than £4.39. I think the 12 units per month plan at £4.79 per meal might be a better bet for him going forward.
Despite these little issues, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and MealPal is firmly established in our corner of the office. I’m not alone in appreciating the great value, varied choice of meals and ability to bypass the queue on collection.
Now, my only decision to make is what to have for lunch today… blackened chicken burger, steak burrito, currywurst with fries, classic tuna salad, chicken katsu curry, spicy beef and pork noodle soup, chicken escalope and mozzarella panini, Marrakech salad, chicken teriyaki, lamb biryani, falafel with guacamole and yoghurt salad…?
Free Trial – Five Free Lunches With MealPal London
MealPal is offering readers of Kavey Eats a free trial of five meals when you join MealPal.
Use mealpal.com/kaveyeats to sign up and you’re ready to go… make your choice, reserve, skip the queue to collect and enjoy! Offer expires 21 April 2017.
There’s no obligation to continue with the service after your trial – you aren’t asked for payment information so it’s not one of those “oh shit I forgot to cancel” schemes that catches out forgetful folk. If you’re anything like me (and many of my colleagues) you’ll quickly become hooked on the choices, value and convenience of MealPal lunching!
Kavey Eats signed up for a free trial using an offer from Tiki Chris. MealPal provided an additional meal cycle to review the service in more detail.
Please leave a comment - I love hearing from you!25 Comments to "MealPal comes to London | Review + Free Trial | Five Free Lunches"
Apart from a few niggles that you have mentioned, it seems like a brilliant idea. I hope some other fast-food outlets in other towns will also pick up on this idea. Also, I hope they offer simple and medium calori meals too, perhaps using a little less of rich sauces and dressings. Eating over 800-1000 calories for sedentary office workers may be too rich and may send them to sleep/effect their performance ;)! For me, if my meal is too tasty, I have a desire to finish it, even when I am full :).
Good luck to them (y)
Ma, you’ll see above I show the filter options to show only healthy meals. There are already plenty of salads, falafels and many lower calorie options.
It is very limited in area ATM, I am directly on the other side of the river, which means the nearest restaurants are a minimum of a 15min walk away.
I have a few niggles (one of which there is no way to indicate food allergies/intolerances so-as to avoid them totally rather than saying I dislike them). So I did have to pick my lunch
However that said I was really rather impressed with my meal from Banh Mi Bay. A good portion of rice, cucumber, tomato and some pickled carrots & mooli, with a nice portion of salty, sweet and crispy garlic pork. With 2 sauces on the side (Red chili sauce, and what I thought was soy sauce, but had chili seeds floating in it)
Yep, is mainly in City and Soho at moment.
Good point on allergies, definitely worth feeding back to them on that.
Glad your first meal was a good one!
What a great idea! I imagine this will do really well, and maybe we will see it Cambridge soon.
I hope so! Anywhere that has high enough number of workers and lunch places to serve them should benefit I think!
I’ve never seen anything like this in Florida. It is a very cool concept if the restaurants accommodated food allergies and diseases (such as Celiac.) I can see how it would be popular in an office district.
Yes, I think it really makes most sense for office districts, really handy.
I think the allergy question is a good one, in terms of how one can handle that through their interface.
Super cool, I bet this will be popular
People in my office are loving it!
What a fantastic idea! Not having to use up your whole time for lunch waiting in queue must be huge too!
Yes, where I am the queues are pretty long sometimes so it’s great to swan past them!!
Wow! Sounds like a great service for people who work away from home!
Yes, it’s perfect for us office workers in areas where there are a lot of us and a lot of lunch places to serve us!
This sounds like a fabulous idea and such good value. I suppose it’s like a gym membership, cheap if you use it often enough.
Kind of – certainly it’s only good value if you use the meal units you’ve bought, or certainly nearly all of them!
Sounds good to me.
Enjoy!
I ordered my first meal yesterday at Poncho 8 and the Q was sooo long. I’m glad I had ordered online and swan pass everyone!! Great portion size too. Love it!
Glad you enjoyed, hope you enjoy all 5 meals!
The latest one I had with Bep Haus was a huge disappointment! Not only was the food was cold but the portion size was extremely small! Although the food was tasty but I won’t return to Bep Haus anymore.
Oh no sorry to hear that. Do feed back to MealPal, they are very receptive.
This is what I heard someone at work talking about today! Too bad the 5-meal trial isn’t available anymore – Shoreditch appears to have 5-6 restaurants around that might be worth a go.
It seems more of a scam. You would expect your order to be similar to what you see on the website or app, but that is not the case. Today I ordered Thai Red Chicken Curry from Pod, the portion was smaller than standard, which was confirmed by the receipt I got of £4.50, when in fact the original cost is £6.39.
That’s a shame. I checked that for mine and it wasn’t an issue for me. I don’t use it anymore as I moved away from London. I would advise you contact MealPal about it as they will likely be keen to sort out any individual vendors not playing by rules.