MealPal- Best Meals Around You Reviews

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.

MealPalBestMealsAroundYou and their business model suffer from two very glaring problems, as a former user of MealPalBestMealsAroundYou 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.

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 MealPalBestMealsAroundYou is absolute garbage. It will take full minutes to launch, and to display the map, if it displays options at all. I thought updating MealPalBestMealsAroundYou would help but it’s somehow even worse now, and I often miss out on my favorite meals because MealPalBestMealsAroundYou just won’t work and they’ll sell out before I can load the stupid thing.

I never write reviews but i feel like i should give A warning for those interested in meal pal. I use a friends referal to get $25 signup for the lunch 20 meal 132 credit for $151 with a 53 credit rollover. Here are some things to be aware of: * when your plan expires, you dont get the rollover credit unless you subscribe again * if you dont order by around 12pm, you wont be able to order for the same day anymore * my plan auto renew whatout a way to just cancel next month or not auto renew. I can either hold or cancel, but not stop auto renew. I have a credit limit, so this was blocked. * i never got the $25 referral * the plan works out to around $1.15 per credit, most meals are between 4-9 credits, but closer to 6-8 each, so each meal is more like $7-9 each or more. * for 20 meal plan, expect to get closer to 16-17 meals. * some places give smaller portions than non meal plans, or dont always give you what was listed, ie missing sides or extras * restaurant seem annoy when you said you have a meal plan pickup * customer service is slow and not very helpful Overall, im paying around $7-9 for a meal, which normally might cost $8-10, so the savings are closer to 10-15% with less flexibility. I would not renew.

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. MealPalBestMealsAroundYou 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.

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 MealPalBestMealsAroundYou 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 MealPalBestMealsAroundYou 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.

They scammed me at the end! So right when my plan renewed it self, I reached out to cancel since covid just hit. They informed me there’s no refund/cancellation so I went on hold. After I got back on off of hold, I have 12 meals left, but MealPalBestMealsAroundYou wouldn’t let me access anything and payment info kept popping up since my credit card expired. Once I entered my credit card info, it charged me for a new cycle ASAP! I contacted them day of and explain multiple times to multiple costumer service representatives my situation but they all kept telling me there’s no refund. It makes not since. I went on hold right when my cycles renewed which means I should have 30 days till next billing but can’t use my 12 meals till I enter my new credit card and got charge another 12 right when I got back on MealPalBestMealsAroundYou . So I have 24 total and couldn’t even use the 12 new ones. I then proceeded to file a dispute but MealPal told them I had ordered lunch during that time period. Yes because that was my original 12 meals from when I first paid for in the beginning of the pandemic! I’ve never seen a business that operates like this, truly shady and will never come back to it.

This sounds like a good idea, but it’s very inflexible and the meal that you get is often subpar from normally great merchants—it’s a faster/bulk-made/lesser quality version (since it’s cheaper!)

Also, Mealpal’s totally self-serving “service” sucks—strange business model that if you don’t use the money you put into your prepaid account by a certain time (say, if something like a PANDEMIC comes along and you’re not going to your office and eating in your work neighborhood), you have to call them and beg that your balance “deadline” be extended. (You can pay EXTRA for a rollover balance, but then why even use this dumb service, just eat/order when you want with no threat of penalties and someone holding your money in advance!!) After you call and beg, they graciously grant you a couple months, but you have to continue to waste your time extending it every couple of months or you lose your hard-earned $90 that you paid them. Then out of the blue, they reactivated my auto charge and tried to charge me another $92 for more bad meals I couldn’t use. In hindsight, I would’ve never wasted my money on this good idea, but very poorly executed business.

While a great concept, I have found MealPal to be more frustrating than convenient. First there is the inconsistent quality among the restaurants available to select your meal from. I have had several occasions where the meal I was given was completely different from what was advertised on the menu (e.g., ordered chicken and veggies and got a container full of only veggies. Order a meal with two sandwiches and one sandwich was missing, etc). Additionally, even though MealPal advertises that you can skip the line when picking up your order, most restaurant don’t actually let you do this and so you have to wait. Adding on to that, MealPal advertises that your meal is supposed to be ready when you arrive and in my experience about half the time it is not, and so you have to wait some more. So instead of being convenient, MealPal turned into a giant waste of time for me and so unfortunately I will be canceling my membership. Hopefully in the future MealPal will figure out how to hold the restaurants they partner with to a higher standard of customer service.

First of all, if you’re in a big city like NYC and there are actually options - the MAYBE mealpal works. In smaller cities - forget about it. So much false advertising- before signup the most showed dozens of locations in my city. After paying, suddenly there are only 7-8 options open DAILY! Meaning for a month you’re eating at the same places over and over again. Not to mention avoid at all costs during covid - half of the restaurants are closed, don’t serve food anymore and even some said they told MealPal to take them off the map 2 years ago and they are still showing them! You will waste all your time finding new places only to find out their closed. So far 35% of restaurants on MealPal for me we’re closed. Then you have to email them. They give you a meal credit back, but again your options are limited and so is your time. Would never recommend. If executed properly this would be a perfect app and business for me, but never again. Also they charge you to delete your account and reopen it. Who does that?!

I do UX for a living and there’s no excuse for the design decisions implemented across their app+webpage. Specifically that the ui doesn't handle allowing the user to cancel the auto renewal of their plan with a click+confirmation. They are intentionally making it harder to cancel/adjust your plan. I had to email someone and they manually adjusted my plan. So you’re telling me it’s cheaper to pay a CSR to manually adjust a plan than to add a button that handshakes with your backend? Sorry I don’t buy it… Furthermore, you’re auto renewing my plan and not telling me the price? The lack of transparency is predatory.

I did a number of google searches trying to figure out how to adjust my plan without emailing and discovered that this issue has been around since 2016. Reading through other reviews, users have complained about being billed an entire year without their knowledge only to have MealPal say “sorry too bad”.

I highly recommend that you fix your app not because you risk more harshly worded reviews but potential litigation.

I booked a Chicken Salad at Athena Food Truck through MealPal app on Sunday evening. Not just that, I made a few other folks book it too so we would walk to the food truck together and get our meals. Since we had been ranting about Mealpal, a few more folks joined us to just walk over there and see how this works.

So we headed out on our half mile walk to get our meals. When we got there, to our surprise, the truck wasn't even there. I tried calling the truck but they had no response. We tried cancelling our meals through MealPal and MealPal wanted to count that meal even though we never got it While quickly checking their website and another food truck info website, we found that the truck was supposed to be at another location about a mile away. Even though the location was quite far and we were running tight for our meetings, we decided to walk over there. Guess what, no truck over there either. So now we were late for our meetings and had to head back immediately. All of us sat hungry throughout our meetings rest of the day.

I use it everyday for lunch and couldn’t be happier. Not carrying a wallet when I go out to grab lunch is so nice by itself, but add to it the savings while not sacrificing options, and you have a very happy customer! Lunch in Manhattan is so expensive so to limit it to $6/meal for the same portions is great. In addition, it has gotten me to branch out and try other places. I also love that it allows small family owned restaurants to compete with large chains as they have equal representation.

The support team at MealPal is incredible too. They are super responsive and super friendly. I missed some days of work, and even though I am not on a rollover plan, after one email, they added the missed days to my next cycle. 5 stars for sure!

The good:
- incredible number of food choices and restaurants
- very responsive and accommodating live customer service
- the savings are mind boggling
- the roll over plans is super good
- a lot of the meals are good size and some are even large
- you are given a time window that you can chose to reserve and pick up your food

What they need to improve on:
- some of the restaurants listed are NOT part of the program actually, so call before deciding what to eat, to confirm
- often the photo of the meal will NOT match the actual food (example in the photo it is white rice, but the meal comes with yellow rice, a deal breaker for me)
- though you have reserved a meal, if it is later in the day, more OFTEN than not they would have ran out of that meal, and you will have to chose something else (again a deal breaker for me)
- sometimes the restaurant will be closed, for one reason or another, but they don’t give you heads up, so when you are on lunch break and have 30-60 min for lunch, and are put in a situation of last minute changes, or having to scramble for lunch, EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING!!!

Final verdict:
- get MealPalBestMealsAroundYou if you are NOT a foodie, NOT picky with your food and have other lunch alternatives than MealPalBestMealsAroundYou!

- DO NOT GET MealPalBestMealsAroundYou if you have limited lunch break, are a foodie, or get easily frustrated!

There were no instructions anywhere in the specific rules and restrictions on when and how to use the credits. So I was unable to use it the first two days as I did not know to follow a certain protocol. Then it told me I had 2 days left and instead ended in 1 day. So the credits came out of the next month, (which heads up automatically renewed itself) leaving me with unused credits and unable to get a full refund of my UNUSED month. So I basically paid full price for all these meals. Because the one 6 credit meal had them take out 13$ from the refund. Overall, MealPalBestMealsAroundYou was difficult to understand, with no clear guidelines. Also don’t use in Brooklyn! I could not see the locations before buying the trial and after putting in my zipcode it led me to believe there was something in my area when there was nothing nearby. They should have a map of service BEFORE asking you to pay, but since they don’t - just avoid if in Brooklyn.

MealPalBestMealsAroundYou/service is the biggest scam I have seen so far. The reason is that it seem very reliable at the beginning, but once you sign up and ready to pay, they never show you how much your actually paying. The only way to know is to call credit card customer service and find out that you are screwed like my case. Then they encouraged me to invite friends and get $30 back, I invited my friends and never got any money back. I kept emailing them, and they always say it takes 3 months. It have been 5 months now, and yea they will never send any money back.
The other part of this scam, is that food wise, you will get much smaller portions of food than if you made a normal purchase if the same meal. I have also noticed some meals tasted really bad as if it was leftover from past days that was not even kept in a fridge. As of cancellation, they won’t make it easy for sure, so keep off this service if you care about your money or food quality.

With a click on your mobile phone, you activate your mealpal membership subscription. But you cannot do so when you want to cancel it. Why don’t the company make it easier to cancel on mobile phone? I actually don’t mind paying for the $130 full price, if they make it easier to use.

I suggest, make it available and easier for customer to cancel, modify, or delay meals on mobile phone even the night before until 9:30 the next morning. Why am I asking this? Because sometimes I want to being home food, it is difficult from those offered from restaurants. They may be similar, but not the same!!! And sometimes I don’t like to get lunch in the rain. I prefer food from home. And sometimes I get sick, to cancel a meal is like going to wait in my doctor’s appointment, much like a monopoly, customer don’t have a choice!!! This is not customer friendly at all.

I love MealPal! I work long days so the last thing I want to do when I get home late is to cook and pack a meal for lunch. At the same time, I don't want to wait in long lines on a tight schedule or pay $15 for lunch everyday.
MealPal solves these problems by offering options from around the community for roughly $6 a meal! You never have to wait in line.
So not only did MealPal solve my lunch problem, I now know about a lot of great lunch spots around me that I wouldn't have known about otherwise.
That said, MealPalBestMealsAroundYou could be improved - needs to be easier to select a small area to pick from, there should be an integration with yelp/Google to be able to both leave and see reviews.

I downloaded MealPalBestMealsAroundYou about a month ago and I chose the 12 meal plan. lost my interest after 2 meals. Today I found that MealPalBestMealsAroundYou subscribe the next cycle for me automatically and there is no notification. I tried hard to find a way to unsubscribe and found more interesting things:
1. You have to notify meal plan 7 days before your cycle ends before you cancel your cycle. Otherwise you get charged automatically for next month
2. If you used all you meals real quickly, guess what, you get charged for next cycle automatically even if that is not the end of the your current cycle
3. You have to find a desktop to unsubscribe and need to look for some tiny options really hard to find your way to cancel
MealPalBestMealsAroundYou is making money by cheating its customers. I have never seen apps like this and this is the first time I write a review on apps. I hope you reconsider using MealPalBestMealsAroundYou.

The MealPal service itself is great. I understand what others are saying—it’s not particularly easy to find what their policies are, and before you purchase a plan there isn’t a lot of info on how it works.

But I save a TON of money on lunches at work this way and it is incredibly convenient. Some of the meals are great, some are small, some are iffy, but it’s 100% up to the restaurants to provide good meals so I just avoid the ones I have bad experiences with.

My issue is that MealPalBestMealsAroundYou makes it difficult to see what’s available when restaurants are bunched up. There is a food court near me, and the map shows 1 or 2 restaurants and it is impossible to see what other meals are available there, even though there are 6 or 8 offerings there. The list view eventually shows them all but they aren’t sorted in any meaningful way. Even knowing what restaurant I’m looking for can take some time.

A few simple app changes would fix issues like these, but I sincerely hope this service has success and continues because I love it!

I love the idea of getting lunch for less than 10 bucks, which is unusual in New York City! However, MealPalBestMealsAroundYou is not flexible. if I am unable to get my lunch, there is no credit for me. I pay my money, I get whole big of NOTHING. I travel from time to time and I am unable to use ALL of my lunches. The money just disappears. What happened to 12 lunches I prepaid if I used only 8, just because I had to travel for my work? Now my lunch price goes back to 10, and let me tell you, the size of those lunches ARE MUCH SMALLER THAN REGULAR PURCHASE. What’s the point here? Where does MY MONEY go? I would like to see the roll over of unused balance. Otherwise, I am cancelling and not recommending to anyone. So far, none of my coworkers have joined, just because of those issues, they can see my struggles, and want nothing of it. They don’t want the same trouble and prefer to pay the SAME price for a bigger meal.

A coworker recommended MealPalBestMealsAroundYou saying how much she loves it and that it’s helping her save money. I signed up after hearing about it only to be disappointed. The catch is saving money on lunch but you’re really paying for what you get. Meaning the portions/containers will be DIFFERENT than the regular orders. I’m realizing that more than half of the time pictures are inaccurate and misleading and I somehow always end up having to purchase something else for lunch because the portion is just too small or if it’s fried rice with beef and eggs there won’t be enough beef or eggs. Mind you I’m a girl who doesn’t have a huge appetite. I really wish I hadn’t signed up for this so people please be alerted. I’m sure there are spots that will serve you just as the picture displays but you would really have to test the waters and expect disappointments, unfortunately.