My First MealsNow Order Went Sideways—Here’s What Drivers Need to Know

On my first MealsNow delivery, I accepted a catering order paying more than $90 outside my normal market. The GPS dropped me at the wrong business, the restaurant names were nearly identical, and what should have been a two-minute correction became a live-delivery problem because I could not reach meaningful support.

Then ezCater identified the correct location almost immediately.

That left me with a much bigger question: What responsibility does a dispatcher have when an active catering order goes wrong?

So in this video, We are talking about:

• How MealsNow Made an Already Bad Situation Worse

• What MealsNow said, what ezCater said, vs How it ACTUALLY is

• Everything in between!

Disclaimer: The content of this video does not contain and is never intended to be legal, business, financial, tax, or health advice of any kind. This video is for entertainment, educational, and informational purposes only. It is advised that you conduct your own research and consult with qualified professionals before applying anything you find online.

I also want to be clear that everything we are going to go over is very market dependent, and what applies to me and my market may not apply to you.

https://youtu.be/v90gnmOprWs

DrivenWyld/YouTube

Receiving the Order

So while I was working one day, I received a phone call from what I thought was a MealsNow support agent, but looking back they were just some kind of representative. She asked me if I could do an order for Fresh Kitchen in Boca Raton. 

Blocked out personal information of the customer

Now this order was for the next day, not in my usual market but was paying over $90 and had a solid dollar:mile ratio. 

I said I would take it and blocked my schedule accordingly. If I was going to drive that far out of the way, I would need ample time to get there. Not to mention, since this is my first order for this platform, I wanted to make a good impression from a data standpoint. 

Even though things didn’t quite go according to plan. 

Arriving on Site

So I turned on my GPS and it took me to Fresh Market and stopped. This was odd, because I have never picked up from Fresh Market or Fresh Kitchen. So in the same way ghost kitchens reside in existing restaurants, warehouses, and other storefronts, I figured I would just ask.

Fresh Market confirmed that the address and merchant was them, but they didn’t receive the order. So I chalked it up to “ezCater disconnect”, which doesn’t seem that harsh until you realize you need to contact MealsNow to tell them about the disconnect but more on that in a bit.

During the course of me standing there: 

• I was showing this order to every department

• I was confirming the address and store name to every person in there

• I was asking who I needed to talk to and they kept pointing to the same manager who SWEARS that everything was correct information wise, but they never got the order.

So my only real solution and method to move forward was one of two things:

• The order was sent to a different location (which the store manager actively took measures to check)

• There was some kind of disconnect I had to communicate with my dispatcher

If I was going to accomplish the latter, I had to get in touch with them… which was not that simple.

Contacting Support

At first, I tried to contact MealsNow by calling the same number that I was contacted on to claim the order and it went nowhere. So I had to look up the support number since I didn’t get anywhere on that one.

Except, MealsNow doesn’t have a support line we can connect with when something comes up. You can call them but they just tell you to go to an A.I. on a website… not even something that you can find on their main site or something to look up on Google, you have to type it in. 

Also, yes you can connect with a person, but they will just tell you that you have to contact them through the Vromo app, only to take an egregiously long time to get back to you and not really tell you anything helpful. 

I was sent pictures of the completed order, which I showed the management of the store and they told me that they don’t recognize it and at that point, I was getting increasingly pissed off. 

So I decided to go above the head of MealsNow for choosing not to properly assist me and call me because in their words, they were too busy to help with live orders, and I contacted ezCater directly. 

Which it may be because I haven’t had an order go sideways in a while, but this time ezCater was more helpful than I thought they would be. 

They didn’t give me the whole “you need to contact your dispatcher” nonsense that you would deal with in these incidents, they were genuinely helpful. 

In fact, they were able to help me identify the issue almost immediately over the phone, which was both annoying and embarrassing. Apparently, when they read the address out loud the manager of Fresh Market finally connected the dots. 

“Oh no, that is Fresh Kitchen, it is in the same strip as this store.”

To be clear:

• The manager of Fresh Market confirmed the address was correct

• The manager of Fresh Market confirmed the store name was one of theirs

• The manager was certain that the items were available and they can start it from scratch if we had the order details

…but then you heard something said out loud, not shown to your face but stated out loud, THEN YOU MAKE THE CONNECTION?

Like I said, I don’t go to Boca Raton often, one of the grievances I was expressing was “I was coming from Pompano Beach and this is outside my normal range of deliveries.” However, you come here more often than me!

I would experience this confusion a LOT less than you would on a regular basis for how much of a name confusion that tends to be, especially since the GPS stops in front of your store. 

At the time, I couldn’t tell whether they were misunderstanding me, brushing me off, or somehow trying to claim the order. Looking back, I don’t believe they were trying to steal anything. 

I think the similar restaurant names and incorrect GPS destination created genuine confusion—but it still should not have taken that long for people familiar with the shopping center to recognize the correct business.

I was so infuriated at the whole situation that I walked the heck out without even giving them an ounce of pleasantries or politeness. I was so pissed off that I no longer had words to give them.

That said, that still doesn’t excuse the support team at MealsNow for choosing to be useless! 

The reality is that they had the capacity to call me because they did that in order to send me the order, but they didn’t want to be involved in solving the problem. It felt like they were more interested in getting the order completed and collecting the money than helping me solve the problem. 

Which then begs the question of whether or not MealsNow should maintain a contract with ezCater, if you assign orders to drivers on behalf of ezCater, you should be just as responsible for supporting the drivers you contract with. 

Finishing the Pick-Up

Now that I finally had a chance to get the proper location, I had to bear the responsibility on behalf of ezCater, MealsNow and quite frankly myself. I entered the location a bit more annoyed than I thought I would be after finding out the proper location. 

Even after reaching the correct restaurant, I was still so irritated that I told the Fresh Kitchen employee I thought Fresh Market might have been trying to take the order.

Looking back, I don’t actually believe that. That was me trying to rationalize, in the moment, how such a simple misunderstanding had gone so far off the rails.

Either way, the actual pickup was simple. I grabbed the food and moved on.

ezCater Support Contacts Me

When I arrived on site to the delivery location, ezCater support called me to ask what the problem was. I explained the issue to them, they told me that if I had a problem in the future to contact them, and that confused me a bit. 

A lot of these catering apps get kind of uppity when drivers reach out to ezCater about these issues. I have documented several versions of this problem already:

Dlivrd, or now known as expedite, threatened their drivers or deactivated them to silence drivers in retaliation. 

The RMDA didn’t like it and threw out JackRabbit Deliveries for insurance compliance issues, and RedWagon Deliveries lied about ezCater blacklisting me. Which turns out they were getting funny with the numbers as well, and I will talk about that deeper a different day. 

FoodFetched, or now known as Fleetly, ghosted me when I needed help as well, and SkipCart and I had many different issues ranging from wrong addresses to horrendous communication practices. 

Also, if you are conducting ezCater orders to any capacity, it is more important than ever that you are making sure that you are receiving the full balance of your tips and in an industry KNOWN for concerns with tip theft, drivers need to be sure. 

And that was one of the reasons I became so interested in accountability within catering deliveries. There are simply too many moving pieces between the restaurant, the dispatcher, the driver, and the customer. 

When something goes wrong, it's often difficult to determine where the problem actually started, which is why I created the ezCater Tip Verification form. If you've ever experienced a questionable tip payout or another issue with one of your catering deliveries, you can submit it through the form. 

The goal isn't to point fingers—it's to help document potential issues, identify patterns over time, and encourage greater transparency throughout the catering delivery industry.

Regardless, after getting off the phone with ezCater I was able to deliver to the mildly annoyed customer without issue and move on. 

What MealsNow Says vs. What I Received

Here is where MealsNow’s public information no longer matches how its driver support actually operates.

Its public driver page still says onboarding includes Slack and Vromo access, identifies Slack as the main support channel, and instructs drivers to contact an assigned VA. None of that applied to my onboarding. I received no personal VA, no Slack-based support channel, and no onboarding materials explaining a live-order escalation process.

For me, the only available support channel was Vromo unless someone from MealsNow chose to call me first. That matters because MealsNow also advertises “real-time support.”

If Slack and assigned VAs are no longer part of the driver workflow, the public guidance needs to be updated—and the system replacing them still needs a real-time escalation path when an active catering order goes wrong.

And don’t even get me started on how both the chatbot and the Vromo app were being stupidly buggy already, let alone having meaningful methods of communication. 

The WORST Trend in the Catering Space

I have said this for a lot of smaller companies, such as Veho support and SkipCart support, but I hate that so many companies are not allowing drivers to access phone support numbers and replacing it with subpar support agents handling emails, text chat and A.I. chatbots. 

I get that hiring staff costs money and companies that are smaller need to save money in any way they can, especially as new kids on the block, but the one thing I cannot STAND is needing live support, not getting it when it matters and I am left to figure shit out on my own. 

Veho support was NOTORIOUS for not getting back to you during the course of the route and getting back to the warehouse and you were just like: “I needed you like 4 hours ago, what the fuck man?”

They always responded with “we have other people we need to help”, which is just code for you kept being overlooked and they needed to say something to justify how incompetent they will always be. 

MealsNow seems to be taking a similar approach, to where they say you needed to contact the dispatcher, the dispatcher won’t talk to you over the phone, claim they “don’t have the capacity to call you at this time” but in reality they do have the capacity but not the sense of responsibility, and blame it on false truths about being busy to call when they weren’t too busy to message you. 

This is incredibly problematic, because this isn’t like package delivery, let’s be honest. 

If a package is delivered a bit later in the day, it sucks but it isn’t that far outside of the norm. 

If a Catering order is late, people get hungry, lunch hours in office get wonky affecting the office as a whole and that can fall poorly on the driver, driver platform, ezCater as a company, the representative ordering the meal and more. 

Catering has a small window to where the order should arrive and be set up, packages can be there at any time of the day really. 

So if something happens and we cannot get in touch with anyone, what would we even do? Just say “Eh screw it, we gave it our best try?” That isn’t a reasonable response at all. Support teams need to be available for drivers when something happens and it can’t just be over a text message. 

To be clear, text can be useful for documenting what happened, but text-only support is inadequate during a live catering problem.

If nobody responds immediately and there is no phone escalation available, the driver has effectively been left without support.

ezCater Support Stepping In?

The fact that ezCater was more engaging with me in this particular instance leads me to ask something: Are third-party dispatchers becoming so unreliable that ezCater is becoming more willing to let drivers contact them directly when an order goes wrong?

One helpful call does not prove that ezCater has formally changed its policy toward drivers. But it does raise the question of whether this is becoming a broader shift.

If it is, that could indicate real movement in the catering space regarding how drivers find support in situations like this—and honestly, I could not be more thrilled about that possibility.

It would suggest that our voices may finally be getting heard and that companies are recognizing text-only dispatch cannot replace real-time assistance. It would also reinforce that the driver on the ground is not always the source of the problem; sometimes the systems between everyone are what failed.

I wonder if that was a revelation that was discovered when RMDA platforms started getting reported, Skipcart or in general. Regardless, I am all for methods to support drivers to get orders done more effectively. 

Support was the biggest systemic problem, but the location itself created another set of avoidable challenges.

Location Challenges Highlighted

This particular location was a bit more frustrating when all factors were considered because this restaurant had every annoying challenge counted against it EARLY. Especially when the location is not in your normal market. 

GPS stops in the wrong location and in front of another that also takes ezCater orders and could be mistaken for a ghost kitchen. 

Which is not too surprising for technology to goof up in this situation, but also the staff claimed the location, store name and information was theirs and didn’t acknowledge the issue until I was standing there for FAR too long. 

It is one thing if you want to gain a customer, but this was an order for another store that I was the driver for, I wasn’t a customer to poach, this is something that you should have acknowledged the moment the phone was shown to you. 

Catering drivers end up outside their market fairly often if the pay is high enough, so it is plausible that a driver would end up confused upon arrival to an unfamiliar location, so the staff who is there much more often than should be more attentive to making sure that the person who shows up there is there for that location, especially when it was in their face. 

When I worked in a grocery store, I didn’t know the other stores in the strip either, but the names were too close to not have come up more than once. I know there is a difference between a grocery store and a restaurant but I have received orders from ezCater to Fresh Market before. 

That was the FoodFetched/Fleetly order gone wrong.

Honestly, if I made the mistake and they told me from the jump, I would laugh it off and this wouldn’t even be content worthy, or at least in the frustrated type of content this type of rant would fall under. 

I have no problem making a mistake but don’t lie or pretend to help when in reality you don’t. 

Nevertheless, if you end up in a market you are not 100% familiar with or even in your own market, make sure you are tracking your miles so you can save time and money by writing them off in your taxes. 

One of the tools you can use to do that is through MileIQ, the #1 mileage tracking app with 80,000+ 5 star ratings on the Apple App Store and Google Play. 

MileIQ makes it easy to:

• Track Miles Automatically

• Easily Classify Your Drives with a Swipe

• Give names to locations you visit regularly to make classifying and reporting even easier

• Add and Manage Multiple Vehicles

• Send and download custom reports with a tap

Want to learn more about how MileIQ works? We encourage you to check MileIQ’s website for more details.

Final Thoughts

I am annoyed at how this turned out but as far as I know about this company, this could very well just be one rough order. 

MealsNow is claiming to be working on their own app, and Vromo is a white label app that I kind of been less than fond of. DeliverThat was using this interface, and a lot of drivers were less than thrilled with it. 

But then again, when they inevitably moved on to having their own app, it ended up not being great and a lot of drivers wanted to keep Vromo and the legacy app so they can grab orders faster so who knows if MealsNow will be just as good or if it will go downhill like DeliverThat did?

I don’t want to assume either way but regardless, it still means that this is just another app to receive orders on and not one to depend on financially, so diversify your income accordingly. 

Regardless, it would be wise to save ezCaters number and learn how to contact their support teams when push comes to shove.

Most orders don’t have issues that require support, but for the instances that do, make sure you know how to fix issues accordingly and document these issues when it matters. 

If you would like to add some other perspective to MealsNow or this incident as a whole, feel free to email me: drivenwyld@gmail.com and who knows? Maybe your email or perspective and be featured in a post as well!