【Belgium】

MealPass is Belgiumgetting smarter.

The 8-month-old subscription lunch service that has grown quickly in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Miami is getting a rebrand. The company will become MealPal, a name change that reflects the addition of a bot that will suggest food for you.

MealPass, now MealPal, allows subscribers to get unlimited weekday lunches for $99 a month, or $119 in New York. Users have to enter their order by a deadline every morning, and each restaurant only offers one lunch through the service each day. The plan comes out to about $6 per meal if used five days a week.

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The company's branding will all change to MealPal on Monday. It's also expanding to Washington D.C. and Chicago, for a total of six cities, on Monday.

While the subscription service has grown quickly in popularity, it's had some complaints. The meals don't allow for substitutions, dissuading picky eaters, vegetarians and those with allergies. Those restrictions are in place in part to encourage restaurants to sign on to the service.

"The model is still subscription-based, but we want the brand to have personality, something that resonates as a brand and understands your preferences," co-founder Mary Biggins said. "We don't just want to be a GrubHub or a Seamless, a platform where you get your food."

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MealPal will prompt subscribers to enter their preferences: Whether they eat meat, if they like controversial ingredients like cilantro or mayonnaise and how much food they want for a typical lunch, for example.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The app will then recommend meals that meet those qualifications.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Biggins thinks the intelligence added to MealPal will help attract more and different customers. Right now, the customer base skews male, Biggins speculates because men might not be as picky about their food orders. That subscriber base is a difference for Biggins, who cofounded the female-skewed exercise class subscription service ClassPass before MealPass.

Most subscribers fall between 22 and 35 years old and most are young working professionals, with a heavy presence from tech companies.

Since its launch in January 2016, MealPass has facilitated 500,000 meals. The company declined to disclose exactly how many subscribers it has, but you can work backwards from 500,000 meals to estimate.

To build MealPal, the company recruited developers from Venmo and Betterment. It didn't invest much in tech the first time around, instead building a bare bones platform to get the service up and running. MealPal is its first big tech expansion and its first foray into any kind of AI.

Other changes added in MealPal include prompting subscribers to order by the service's 9:30 a.m. deadline, automatically adding an appointment to pick up your lunch to your calendar and opening orders for the next day at 5 p.m. instead of 7 p.m. to accommodate those who order before leaving work.

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