Let’s get passed Tinder or Happn and talk real business here: food.
Founded by Tom Jakubowicz and Claudio Seidler, mealUp is a website developed to link Berlin’s food lovers together and is another way of meeting new people.
It works like this: you enroll via Facebook, set up your profile, and then you can check which people are planning on eating in which place and if you want to join them for a ‘meal up’, or maybe actually ask people to join you for a nice meal.
Comparisons between dating apps like Tinder or Happn was one of the first things that came to my mind upon hearing about mealUp, after all, isn’t it just another way of flirting?
Yes and no. With mealUp, the pressure of dating is a little bit off the table. Of course you can meet a nice, handsome, interesting person too, but most of all the aim is for people to have nice company with whom to try out new foody destinations.
Tom, one of the founders, was very clear when it came to the fact that their goal is to get people to interact in real life, and not only stay in touch in the online world, plus get together with people that have already something in common: a love of food.
An interesting point is that when I was doing research into Tinder and Happn (why not write an article about that?), I heard a lot of complains that people do not actually meet, or even worse, when they meet it is something that they definitely did not expect – a total lack of mutual interests and things to talk about, leading to a huge disappointment.
With mealUp, the risk of this happening is a bit lower once expectations – in theory – are only put over the restaurants, personally selected by the founders and mostly tested by them, instead of the company.
The website is also open for suggestions, as they want be a better and more accurate kind of a food guide, different, for example, when you go to Yelp and find there 8000 restaurants and don’t really know where to begin to choose.
Another feature of mealUp is that you can also use #hashtags to lead people to your company event or party. Everyone registered can know who is going and where the place is. Quite cool.
Are you hungry for something different today? Let’s mealUp!