Your midday meal can make or break your morale at work. And if you’re not too careful, you can fall into a lunch slump, grabbing the same old thing to eat every day in the name of convenience.
MealPass - a new venture launching in Boston tonight - is making that argument moot. With a subscription ringing in at $99 per month, you’ll have access to a network of restaurants in downtown Boston from which you can pick up lunch every weekday.
It will not only give you a variety of affordable lunch options in your area, but - as co-founder and Mass-native Mary Biggins hopes - it will introduce you to eateries in Boston you might otherwise be overlooking.
That time Whole Foods was inspiration
As its name implies, MealPass is similar in structure to the widely known and used ClassPass, which allows subscribers to participate in exercise classes at gyms and studios throughout Boston. Biggins is a ClassPass co-founder, too, but the food-focused venture is separate from the fitness startup.
“My co-founder and I were thinking of ideas for a startup and it came to use while we were at a Whole Foods,” Biggins told me. “Walking into a Whole Foods, people have so many different quick and good quality options available to them.”
MealPass wants to recreate the same kind of food selection for folks, while giving local restaurants the opportunity to participate in the experience.
Biggins explained, “We wanted to focus on one neighborhood to start, making sure we offer a lot of choices in close walking distance to people’s work before expanding...We wanted at least 50 restaurants in downtown Boston and the Financial District.”
Already, MealPass has built up quite the selection. If you subscribe, you’ll have your pick of lunches from take-away eateries like Al Capone’s and Chicken and Rice Guys to sit-down establishments like The Merchant. The meal choices change daily, as each restaurant offers a different dish for MealPass every day. At 7 PM every night, subscribers will receive the menu for the following day, so their options are constantly rotating.
Why they're bringing it to Boston
MealPass launched last week in Miami and Boston was purposefully picked as a second operating area. Biggins maintains that the ecosystem here is prime for what MealPass is trying to accomplish - and it doesn’t hurt that she grew up in Sudbury with her six siblings and started her career in Boston at VistaPrint.
“Boston was the second market for ClassPass and we knew we wanted to get there really quickly this time around, too,” Biggins started. “It’s such an ideal city for it.”
“There are so many restaurants and people generally walk the way they usually walk, following the same path everyday,” she continued. “We’d show them that if they take a different route, they’ll discover new options for food.”
At the same time, local restaurants can benefit from broadening their lunch crowds. So in addition to getting you over the midday hump with tasty and economical lunch options, MealPass will also be supporting Boston food businesses.
Image via MealPass.
