Subscription lunch service MealPal launches in Sydney

IF YOU’RE one of those people who would rather not have to deal with sorting out lunch every day, this service might be for you.

A NEW subscription lunch service called MealPal launches in Sydney today, and it promises to make eating out cheaper and healthier.

More than 100 restaurants in the Sydney CBD have signed on with the service, including Sumo Salad, Guzman Y Gomez, Fratelli Famous, Chicken Confidential and Zeus Street Greek.

MealPal was founded in 2016 by New York-based entrepreneur Mary Biggins and is already available in London, Toronto and most big cities in the US. It’s aimed at busy CBD professionals who usually buy their lunch and end up spending $10-15 per day on a single meal.

Consumers can choose from two packages which are valid for 30 days — either 20 lunches at $7.49 each or 12 lunches for $7.99 each — so a total of $149.80 or $95.88 per month.

Orders must be placed through the app from 5pm the night before or by 9.30am in the morning and collected from the restaurant between 11.30am and 2.30pm, during a preselected 15 minute window.

“Our goal is to make lunch more affordable and more efficient for young working professionals,” Ms Biggins told news.com.au.

“When you go to pick up your lunch, you get to skip the line and your meal will already be ready, so you can be in and out very quickly,” Ms Biggins said.

“Consumers end up making healthier choices because they’re picking [their meal] in advance. Rather than having an impulse at 12.30pm, they’ve already made a healthy decision ahead of time.”

Ms Biggins says ordering lunch from MealPal is significantly cheaper than ordering off one of the many existing food delivery apps, such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Foodora.

“You usually pay a pretty big premium with most food delivery apps and once you factor in the cost of delivery, it can get very expensive. It’s not affordable on a daily basis,” she said.

“But with MealPal, you can say ‘Oh, I’m going to order lunch’, because it doesn’t cost that much more than bringing your lunch from home.”

MealPal says its service is more efficient because it drives large volumes of orders. As the restaurant knows about these orders ahead of time, it is able to plan in advance and operate more efficiently.

“In the early days, we did a test in Boston where we had 22 friends and family members go and stand in line and order off the regular menu and it took the restaurant 28 minutes to fill the orders.

“Then we said, ‘OK make 100 of your cobb salad’ and they were able to make all the salads in 29 minutes.

“Most restaurants are operating on very low cost margins — it’s a notoriously difficult industry — because margins are low and costs are high.

“The biggest cost a restaurant faces is labour and we make that labour cost more efficient. We can drive really high volumes everyday.”

Subscription-based apps are becoming popular among young people with significant discretionary incomes who are still interested in maintaining a budget.

Ms Biggins is also the co-founder of fitness app ClassPass, where users pay a monthly fee to access different workout classes from a variety of boutique gyms and fitness studios. ClassPass was founded in 2010 in New York City and is now valued at an estimated $400 million. according to Forbes.

“I think [subscription apps] are the modern way to budget your money, because you know that you’re spending a certain amount and you’re not going to go above that,” Ms Biggins said.

“So it’s easy to say ‘I’m spending this much on food this month’ or ‘I’m going to spend this much on health and fitness’.”

MealPal launches on Tuesday, June 6 in the Sydney CBD and will soon expand to other neighbourhoods.

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