For Mary Biggins, a business model that benefits both its partners and customers is nothing new. She is the co-founder of ClassPass, a service that provides gym classes at various gyms and studios around cities for a flat monthly fee.
Her newest business model, similarly, delves into a mutually beneficial structure of business.
MealPass is a weekday dining service that caters to young, working professionals and, with Biggins’ help, launched in Downtown Boston on Wednesday. The company created a business model to promote eating at local lunch venues for affordable prices.
“It’s a two-sided marketplace,” said Biggins, a Sudbury native. “We wanted to help find people find an efficient way to get their lunch every day and help small business owners increase their revenues.”
Subscribers to the meal service pay a flat fee of $99 per month for a single, lunchtime dining option at 50-plus restaurants affiliated with MealPass. The available meals at each of the restaurants are posted on the MealPass website the night before, and subscribers place an order before 9:30 a.m. to give the restaurant time to fill their lunch order.
Biggins cited the density of Boston’s downtown area, as well as her “soft-spot” for the city, as her reasons for bringing this business to her hometown after its success in Miami.
Part of the allure for people to join MealPass, she said, is the opportunity it creates to sample a wide variety of the city’s best food.
“We strive to have a lot of diversity,” Biggins said. “Some people want light meals for lunch, and some people want heavy.”
Despite the diversity of dishes served, there is one similarity amongst the MealPass-affiliated restaurants — their popularity with the downtown demographic. MealPass has focused its attention on trendy downtown restaurants and eateries that have high reviews on sites like Yelp and Google Reviews.
“I think an important part of the process is research.” Biggins said. “We wanted to understand the best restaurants and the neighborhood that they’re in.”
One restaurant in affiliation with the company is The Merchant, which serves modern versions of classic American food.
“All the users seem to be really excited,” said The Merchant’s general manager, Tena Reynolds. “We’re excited to see if we get repeat customers and feedback.”
As for choosing the dishes served each day for MealPass subscribers, Reynolds said they try to pick the most popular items off the menu.
“But it also depends on what we will able to make on that day,” she added.
Another restaurant working with MealPass is Koy, a chic, Korean-fusion fare restaurant.
“They sought us out after looking at local reviews for our lunch menu,” said Catarina Chang, the general manager at Koy. Chang said the current setup for ordering has created some problems with food preparation.
“It’s more difficult because we’re a full-service restaurant,” she said.
However, she said she thinks that these challenges will be fixed as time goes on. Chang also said she is excited for a greater variety of people to sample the food at Koy, something she credits to the affordability that MealPass creates.
