After serving over 100 meals, NÜDL, the mealsharing service launched this summer, is still going strong.

While NÜDL is staying loyal to its mission — bring Macalester students together by letting them share a meal — it has evolved and introduced new features that hope to make the startup stronger and more efficient.

The idea of NÜDL is still the same; you go online and sign up for a meal that intrigues you. When you show up, the food is ready, and all you have to do is pay the host. From there, you get to enjoy a home-cooked meal with students you may or may not know.

But now, the process of signing up for a Mealshare is much easier. NÜDL launched their own website, nudl.co, a few weeks ago, which lets anyone host or attend a Mealshare without having to use Google Calendar.

“It’s exciting, because it means a little less canvassing and a little bit less on-the-ground,” NÜDL co-founder Alex Dangel ’16 said. “A host can now set up a Mealshare completely on their own, and people can start attending it without us putting any information on the internet.”

NUDL’s website has a list of upcoming Mealshares, which is much easier to browse than before, but it also has features like “The Feed,” which shows, in real time, a feed of everyone that has signed for all upcoming Mealshares. Mealshares can also be seen in map form, to display where exactly future meals are going to be hosted.
In the future, NÜDL’s cookbook will be hosted on their main site. Right now, the cookbook — found now at www.nudlcookbook.tumblr.com — features recipes from different Mealshares as well as photos and quick narratives from those Mealshares. Emma Foti ’18 is responsible for the cookbook, which will eventually migrate out of Tumblr and onto nudl.co.

NÜDL has focused recently on partnering with different organizations around campus, to show how NÜDL can help them reach out and find new members.

“Hosting a Mealshare would not be for hosting a dinner for you and your group to get together,” Dangel said. “It would be … to reach out to students that they normally wouldn’t interact with, and better understand how their project benefits the Mac community.”

As an example of that, MCSG President Ian Calaway ’16 and Vice President Jolena Zabel ’16 jointly hosted a Mealshare to reach out to constituents, which Dangel says was well-attended.

Dangel said that he and fellow co-founder Caitlin Toner ’15 are reaching out to Macalester professors as well, to see if they could host Mealshares in the future.
“There’s been considerable interest from professors. We’ve talked to a few, but we haven’t had our first professor-hosted Mealshare yet,” Dangel said. “We’re still in the process of seeing what that would look like, and what value that would bring to a professor, and how is that meaningful [to them]?”

In the future, Dangel says NÜDL is focused on making it easier for students to host Mealshares. As different obligations pile up and free time disappears, hosting a Mealshare and cooking for a large group of people becomes harder to do. To resolve that, Dangel says that NÜDL will build a resource page for potential hosts.

“I see what I’m doing as reflective of how to make it easier for other people,” Dangel said. “The constant project is making the hosting process easier on people. Cooking dinner for seven people is not always easy.”