Marc Lore, a veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to bring AI to his current venture, Wonder.
At the heart of these plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that uses AI to enable anyone from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers to design and launch their own restaurant brands in under a minute. The virtual restaurants will operate across Wonder’s growing network of technology-enabled kitchens, which currently has 120 locations and is expected to reach 400 locations next year.
Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from a food truck to a 10- to 20-seat fast-casual restaurant. However, these are no ordinary restaurants. These are “programmable cooking platforms” that can operate as 25 different restaurants based on cuisine within an increasingly robotic, all-electric kitchen.
Lore, who spoke at the Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, said these kitchens have a library of 700 ingredients. The “restaurants” they operate are actually comprised of different brands operating within these locations.
These kitchens have up to 12 staff members, as well as cooking technology such as conveyors and robotic arms involved in the cooking process. The company also just acquired Spice Robotics, a maker of automatic bowl-making machines previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, the company plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make about 80% of the sauces currently posted in recipes on the Internet.
Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes using Wonder’s software.
Leveraging AI technology, Lore provided further details on how this would work, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front end with AI prompts.”
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“You enter what kind of restaurant you want to create, and the AI creates your restaurant in less than a minute. It creates the name, branding, description, photos, pricing, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained in an interview at a WSJ event. Future restaurateurs can refine the prompts if changes are needed. Once the show is ready to go live, the restaurant will be open at all Wonder locations.
The company currently operates 120 of these “programmable cooking platforms” and expects that number to increase to 400 next year. Lore pointed out that adding robotics to the equation doesn’t necessarily mean reducing the number of employees. In return, it increases the number of meals your kitchen can produce in a given period of time.
“We have a capacity of about 7 million with 12 people,” he said. “We’re on track to achieve 20 million throughput in 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal is to have 1,000 unique restaurants in 2,500 square feet, perhaps by 2035,” Lore added.
The goal of these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. For example, restaurateurs can test recipes to gauge customer response before adding them to their brick-and-mortar locations.
Lore also envisions other use cases for the platform, such as allowing influencers to connect with their audiences through their own “restaurant” brands without actually starting their own chains.
“That could be mega-influencers or micro-influencers, people who want to monetize their followers,” Lore said. “Or it could be a personal trainer who wants to make a specific bowl. It could be a nonprofit organization. It could be Disney.” [marketing] their new movie. Anyone can create a restaurant. ”
Whether that many people actually want it is an open question. Ghost kitchens, a similar concept that promised to allow brands to sell food without owning a restaurant, hit hard times in the early 2020s, with several well-known operators downsizing or closing as they struggled to build customer loyalty. The automation layer and AI added by Wonder may address some of these pitfalls, but this model is not yet proven at scale.
MrBeast Burger, the famous ghost kitchen experiment, vividly illustrated the challenge. The brand faced widespread complaints of inconsistent food quality as a result of relying on dozens of different contract kitchens and staff. Wonder’s programmable and increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve just that problem.
Lore acknowledged that this idea still has its limits. Wonder’s team (including robots) can’t do things like toss and roll pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder focuses on simpler basic dishes like burgers, wings, fried chicken, and bowls.
The overall plan is combined with Roar’s other acquisitions, including Grubhub, a business with 250 million deliveries a year, and Blue Apron, a meal kit business. Wonder is now focused on acquiring restaurant brands like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it acquired in February for $6.5 million.
“When you buy a brand, you buy a brand with 10 stores, or even 50 stores, and you grow it to 1,000 stores overnight, there’s incredible arbitrage there,” Rohr pointed out.
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