Leah McCann Smith | Writer & Editor

Fellow urbanites, type-A planners, and food-lovers,

In the conquest to enjoy New York life to the fullest, which means eating as well as I can while remaining on my slim, decent, average millennial budget, I’m embarking on a trial run of MealPal: what I heard was “the ClassPass for food.” MealPal (previously MealPass) operates in the major metropolis areas of the United States—DC, New York, Miami (random), San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago. My experience is specific to New York, and on a more granular scale, to the Financial District of Manhattan, where I work.

Straight from the MealPal site, here’s how it all works, as illustrated by three Clip Art icons

Break it down, please

The idea behind MealPal is that you pre-pay for a 30-day monthly subscription of lunches. You can choose from 12 lunches/cycle or 20 meals/cycle. You can imagine that the more meals you buy, the cheaper each meal is. Your cycle (boy, I hate using the word “cycle” in this context) starts the day after you pay. So if you pay on November 15, your MealPal cycle will start on November 16 and will end on December 15. THIS IS KEY: you must use ALL your MealPal lunches by this end or you lose the lunches that are already paid for. You will not be credited for the meals you didn’t order in your cycle.

Considering it? Before you do, some other must-knows

• MealPal works only for lunchtime and only for lunchtime hours (11 a.m. — 2:30 p.m.), Monday-Friday.
• You must order your meal before 9:30 a.m. on the day of your lunch. However, the ordering process begins at 5 p.m. the day before you will be ordering lunch, so if you’re eager to get the “good options,” I recommend giving your lunch-ordering a day ahead of time a shot.
• You can’t order lunch on a holiday. MealPal does not operate on holidays, though they don’t really specify which ones. For instance, the service WAS indeed open for business on Veterans Day. Which is a holiday. I digress.
• With MealPal, lunches are either $5.99/ea. with the 20-meal cycle, or $6.39/ea. with the 12-meal cycle. Prices do not include local sales tax. By the time you factor in taxes in New York, a 12-meal monthly pass ends up being closer to $80. For the smaller plan, with 12 lunches, at $80/month, meals actually come out to be closer to $6.67/meal. Still pretty dang good for New York City.
• TIP: MealPal is (currently) request-only. If you try signing up but don’t pull the trigger, the service will often send you a coupon by email for your first month. I got my first month for $30 off ($50/mo instead of $80/mo) because I didn’t pull the trigger one or two (or five) times. Maybe I know how digital marketing works, maybe I don’t. But the $30 off for the first month definitely pushed me in the right direction.
• Canceling with MealPal is annoying, so I’ve heard. In his not-so-stellar review of the service, Brady Dale wrote, “Further, MealPal goes to extra lengths to make leaving difficult. As the terms go on to explain further down:
  

  Cancellation of Membership. You may terminate your subscription at any time with 7 days’ notice by emailing hello@mealpal.com. Following any cancellation you will continue to have access to your subscription through the end of your current prepaid billing period.

  Seven days’ notice! Not only is there no straightforward way on your account dashboard to cancel, the site needs a full seven days to stop a payment once you have figured out how to do it. And I thought its page load speeds were slow…”

• Supposedly MealPal’s got over 600 New York City restaurants alone, signed up to participate in the program.

I gave MealPal my money. Now what?

To start (after you’ve paid, of course), MealPal asks you to enter your food preferences. Vegetarian? Meat-eater? Healthy-minded? These are all options you can specify in what you like to eat for lunch. For me, I’m pretty versatile. The only thing I WON’T eat is sauerkraut and most seafood, especially for lunch. Smelly fish lunches are the worst.

If you’re considering MealPal, check back for reviews of my own MealPal experience, and decide for yourself.