MealPal- Best Meals Around You

I think MealPal is a pretty decent service, and many gripes have to do more with restaurants that is out of the control of the company. Think about it, these restaurants are selling discounted meals during peak lunch service—obviously some of them are going to be lower quality or kind of strange combinations of foods. For that reason I tend to stick to chains that have more standardized portions and kitchen workflows to make sure I have something substantial and fresh. My biggest gripe is that there is no meal rollover or the ability to use multiple meals in one day. I paid for 20 meals, so I should get my 20 meals. This is the biggest reason I am cancelling my account. I understand losing a credit if I late cancel a meal, but on days I am working from a different location I just have to lose my $6. Finally, the functionality of the app is absolute garbage. It will take full minutes to launch, and to display the map, if it displays options at all. I thought updating the app would help but it’s somehow even worse now, and I often miss out on my favorite meals because the app just won’t work and they’ll sell out before I can load the stupid thing.

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This app and their business model suffer from two very glaring problems, as a former user of this app for over two years. First off, you often receive food from the restaurant that is almost entirely carbohydrates, and very little protein. Meaning, the restaurants get away with giving you the cheapest food options available, which is often an empty calories in the form of bread and grains and other generally unhealthy food. So when you get a six dollar lunch, the restaurants get away with giving you low quality food. And it may look like a lot at first but you often get a large amount of low-quality food, and/or a very small amount of good quality food. Secondly, they engage in deceptive marketing with their email marketing program and promotions to get you to resubscribe. Again, tonight I got a 30% promotion from their email marketing list, and when I clicked on the ad it took me to MealPal and there was no 30% off promotion. Just because they’re a stupid start up doesn’t mean their absolved from deceptive advertising laws, this is highly illegal. This should be reported to the FTC, the federal trade commission, because deceptive marketing is illegal, even for cutesy start up’s. These start ups take tens of millions of dollars in funding from banks and investors, and they can’t even follow the laws of marketing. Someone should report this.

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I just want to say I loved using MealPal for a while. I reached out to so many friends to use this service. Then they pulled a fast one on me and I’m sure I’m not the only one but I hope people are checking their bank statements to realize they AUTOMATICALLY ENROLLED EVERYONE INTO THEIR MORE EXPENSIVE ROLLOVER PLAN FOR THE NEW YEAR. I emailed them and their response was laughable “an email was sent out telling you about this change back in December” first off they send an email every other day... Idk who has time to read all those emails since they’re usually irrelevant/trying to get you to have someone you know sign up. Second off nowhere in the title does it say “your plan is changing” it was at the very bottom of a paragraph that says we will automatically enroll everyone into this new service at the end of the year. That’s such a shady business practice, it may have only been a $10 increase but you really made what felt like a sincere business model feel like a cash grab, that doesn’t care about their users. I put my account on hold and will probably end up canceling if they can’t find a way to persuade me to keep it which at this point seems unlikely since I already reached out. Not to mention it even shows on my account I referred friends and received nothing for it and now I’m being charged MORE for a rollover plan I will not use.

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I signed up for a discounted plan and would say it’s quite worth it. Getting a $10-$12 salad from Just Salad, for $4 is pretty good. However, not all the deals are that great. Some place offer terrible lunch options like “one sushi roll”. That’s not MealPals doing though, it’s the restaurants. The annoying part is forcing users to go use their desktop version to cancel an auto renewing membership, that I’m not even sure I can cancel on the desktop version. The most annoying part is that the meals expire, even more annoying is that they will try to offer Meals That Don’t Expire as a marketing tool to keep you on board. These meals should never expire. This app and their marketing team are lagging behind significantly in transparency trends and decent business practice. I imagine they make decent money, counting on people to miss meals. But I travel, I have meeting that run late, I have a last minute working lunch, I don’t want to walk .5 mile because it’s snowing and 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside. There’s just no way I could ever justify renewing my subscription with business practices like these, without some serious change. It also doesn’t look like I’m the only one with these complaints.

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First off, I liked using Mealpal (MP). The variety of food choices is a good way to mix up lunch. What I don’t appreciate is a company that’s completely opaque when it comes to billing and purchase confirmation. The problems all started when I had used up my first round of meals (12 lunches). When I went to order my 13th lunch the app notified me that I was out of lunches and asked if I’d like to start a new cycle. Now, I wasn’t completely sold on the MP structure but I was willing to give the next cycle a go if they offered some kind of incentive (a friend told me that they had for him). Thinking that the app would present me with plan choices as it had done for the first cycle, I clicked ‘start now.’ Instead, my card was immediately charged for the next cycle with NO warning. No explicit purchase screen with my card details, no amount to be charged, and no confirmation email afterwards, just one tap on a button. I had to check my card statement to make sure. I’ve never used a service that was so loose with charging customers as this and the whole process left a bad taste in my mouth. I immediately emailed customer support about the problem and they took 5 days to respond to my email. For these reasons I’m done using MP.