ClassPass has successfully made its mark on the San Francisco exercise world, and founder Mary Biggins is now hoping that success will extend to the food world. Starting today, Biggins’ latest venture, MealPass, has launched in the SF market. MealPass is the same concept as ClassPass; users pay $119 a month for lunch pick-up every weekday (which breaks down to $6 per day if used every day).
Every restaurant that has signed on to the service — which is more than 100 in the Financial District and SoMa, including American Grilled Cheese Kitchen, Mixt Greens, Urban Picnic, Piperade, Schroeder’s, The Organic Coup, and more — will offer one set meal a day and users can choose which meal they want starting at 7 p.m. the night before up until 9:30 a.m. the day of. Then, restaurants prepare the meal for pick-up that allows MealPass people to skip the line.
San Francisco is MealPass’ fourth city; it launched in Boston and Miami in January, expanding to New York City in March. Biggins understands that in SF, though, MealPass is entering a very crowded space what with UberEats, Caviar, Sprig, and more competing for business. "The food tech space is really crowded in San Francisco, so every restaurant we talk to is usually working with other platforms, and it’s always a comparison of what they get from one service to another," Biggins told Eater. "For us it’s important to differentiate that we're not an on-demand delivery platform. We really help restaurants produce meals more efficiently; restaurant owners get orders earlier in the day, so they have ability to prep meals and make them more efficiently than they would with custom orders."
As for how users benefit, Biggins points to the long lunch lines in FiDi and SoMa, something that MealPass lets you skip entirely. "Because you’ve preordered and prepaid, you just go around and get your meal right away," she said. "That’s a feature New Yorkers love, and given the line sizes we've seen in SF, we think that will be a popular feature in the market."
MealPass has seen success in its prior cities; since launch, people have ordered lunch more than 200,000 times through the site. Time will tell how it fares in this market where food startups like SpoonRocket and Kitchit have already started to close, but starting today, it’s another lunch option for busy worker bees.