Have you ever been stuck on choosing somewhere to eat for lunch? Ended up spending more than £7 on just lunch alone. Sick of being long queues waiting to order, be served and the wait for your food. Well, Mealpal comes to the rescue. It’s a subscription for your lunches paid up front for a cycle of 20 or 12 meals in a month. All you have to do is order your lunch on the Mealpal website or app at 5 pm the day before or 9:30 am on the day. Choose a 15 minute window time slot to pick up your meal and that’s it.
The pricing structure for Mealpal currently is £4.79 per meal for the 12 or £4.39 for 20. Initially, when Mealpal first launched in London I got a 2 day trial for lunches. Working in the Fitzrovia area it was limited with options and I had to walk a good 15-20 mins to find somewhere that took Mealpal orders. It was misleading when I ordered my meal with Tongue & Britsket that the meal I selected came with homemade chips but instead I was given a packet of crisp.
Once more places started to do Mealpal I had a few more options to choose in the area. A good mixture of cuisines, grilled pork salad from Banh Mi Bay. Fresh healthy salads from Ethos, butternut squash and spinach. I had a bad experience with a favourite of mine Patty & Bun even when I turned up at my designated time my food was just not ready, waiting for 20 minutes on back orders when it was time to collect my food. There were plenty of chips but they were inedible and stale. Hard as a rock, it just went in the bin. ICCO pizza is made to order and comes out fresh out the oven.
Overall I did enjoy using Mealpal but also found it’s quite restricted for the 12 meal cycle I had to try to use it up before going away on holiday. So you can imagine if you did go on the 20 lunch cycle you need to plan your year accordingly otherwise you be wasting your money on unused lunches. Another negative was I found that some of the places where I collected my food. Had special lunchtime deals, which meant I wasn’t really saving any money. Patty & Bun does £5 burger deal, ICCO pizza is £5 and under on takeout pizzas. Sometimes I did find it hard with the restricted pickup times, you never know if a meeting runs late or something else crops up. Meaning I’m rushing to get out to pick up my food.
On the flip side, I did find it worthwhile when the time is tight, some places were great with just turning up, saying you have a Mealpal pickup and the food is ready to go.
