Mabel’s offers freshly prepared meals which customers can browse at the unit or pre-order through the Mabel app and collect by scanning a QR code.
Founded by former WPP brand strategist turned chef and entrepreneur Jason Hartley, Mabel positions itself as a challenge to traditional convenience retail, offering daily-prepared wraps, sandwiches and salads made in the company’s London kitchen and delivered to smart refrigerated units for collection.
Mabel’s pricing ranges from £5-£8 for wraps and sandwiches and £8-£10 for salads, with menus built around British seasonal produce.
The company says its infrastructure removes the need for staffed retail environments, allowing more investment to be directed into sourcing and kitchen operations. Its units also use machine learning and agentic AI technology to forecast demand by location, time of day and product, aiming to reduce waste and improve product availability.
Guy said the appeal of the project lies in applying restaurant-level standards to food designed for everyday mobility and speed.
“You don’t need a restaurant setting to offer great ingredients and transparency,” says Guy. “You need good people who care about creating great produce, combined with people making great food in a way that allows quality to scale. That’s what excited me about Mabel. “It takes the standards people associate with good independent restaurants and puts them into a new format, in everyday spaces where people actually eat. “Grab-and-go does not have to mean compromise. People are busy, but that does not mean they should have to settle for food that feels tired, anonymous or over-processed.”
Shoreditch is the first of three planned pilots for 2026, with further sites expected to follow across London in workplaces, transport hubs, gyms and residential developments. Mabel is targeting 60 operational locations in the capital by the end of 2027, with the next site expected to open in August.
Jason Hartley, founder and CEO of Mabel, adds: “We’ve normalised bad food because it’s convenient. That seems like a crazy compromise.
“Mabel started with a simple question: why is some of the worst food people eat often eaten when they’re busiest, most tired or most in need of something decent?
“Workplaces, stations, airports, gyms, hospitals, universities, hotels and residential buildings are places where people are already living their day.
“They should not have to choose between expensive delivery, sad grab-and-go or skipping a meal.”
A second phase of development is planned to introduce heat-to-eat meals, extending the offer into evening and shift-worker demand.