It’s a Friday night. The long week is just done and you’re all ready to let loose for the weekend. What could be a better way to kickstart the weekend than great food? You decide to order in and open the first food delivery app. The price shown for the food you want to order is Rs 150 and the delivery time is 45 minutes. Uff, 45 minutes is too much! You open the next app and see the rate here is Rs 135, but the delivery time 50 minutes. The trade-off seems okay. Subsequently, you try all the apps individually and now have to make a decision. But by this time, you have already forgotten the price and duration shown in the first app. But now you’re just too tired; you just go ahead and order food from the first app you can open in your phone.
This indeed is a scenario most of us would have faced. If not yet, soon, in the future, with more and more food delivery players sprouting in the market, this is bound to be a pain point for consumers looking to order food.
Mealme.ai, an American start-up, aims at curbing this shortcoming in the food delivery industry. Mealme.ai currently operates in the US and compares the prices of food and the time taken for delivery amongst all the food delivery services like Postmates, GrubHub, UberEats, and several other regional food delivery services. It is a first of its kind food delivery aggregator startup. It acts as a food search engine where, upon typing the name of the food, all the different delivery options and prices are posted, thereby streamlining the process of comparison between multiple delivery apps. The application works in such a way that you can handle the checkout inside it as well. This way, it eliminates the process of app-switching. Mealme’s revenue model is based on the margin it makes between what it charges users for orders and the total revenue it passes along to food delivery apps.
Mealme not only acts as a food price and delivery time comparer but also provides intelligent recommendations based on your previous orders. It initially started as a food-focused social application where people posted pictures just of food. However, the organization soon saw that its users were posting pictures of food just to get an idea from other platform users on which delivery service would be able to get them the food quickest. This ignited a spark amongst the founders who then transformed this product.
Right now, Mealme has closed a 900,000 USD pre-seed round. The startup aims to improve delivery time transparency and make pricing competitive between the different food delivery applications.
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