Marc Lore and Wonder: AI Revolutionizes Restaurant Creation

Marc Lore, a seasoned entrepreneur in the e-commerce space, is redefining how restaurants can be created using artificial intelligence. After selling his previous startups to giants like Amazon and Walmart, Lore is now focusing on his new venture, Wonder, which integrates AI to revolutionize the restaurant industry.

Wonder Create: An Innovative Platform

At the heart of this revolution is Wonder Create, an initiative that allows anyone, from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers, to design and launch their own restaurant brand in less than a minute. This platform uses AI to automatically generate the restaurant's name, branding, description, images, pricing, nutritional information, and all its recipes. Once the process is complete, the virtual restaurant goes live on Wonder's growing network of tech-equipped kitchens, which currently has 120 locations and is expected to reach 400 next year.

Programmable and Automated Kitchens

Lore's startup has evolved from a simple fleet of food trucks to fast-casual style restaurants, offering between 10 and 20 seats. However, these establishments are not traditional restaurants. They operate as programmable cooking platforms, capable of transforming into 25 different types of restaurants depending on the desired cuisine. These kitchens are fully electric and increasingly automated, incorporating cutting-edge technologies such as conveyors and robotic arms.

At the "Future of Everything" conference organized by the Wall Street Journal this week, Lore revealed that these kitchens have a library of 700 ingredients. The "restaurants" they house are actually numerous different brands operating from these locations. In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, advanced cooking technologies are involved in the meal preparation process.

Acquisition and Expansion

Wonder recently acquired Spice Robotics, a manufacturer of automatic bowl preparation machines that was previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, the company plans to introduce an "infinite sauce machine" capable of creating about 80% of all sauces found in recipes on the internet today. Wonder Create, announced earlier this year, allows anyone to use Wonder's software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.

Lore provided more details on how this initiative works, describing the plan as something resembling a "Shopify front-end with an AI prompt." The user inputs the type of restaurant they want to create, and the AI builds the restaurant in under a minute, taking care of all necessary aspects. The potential restaurateur can then refine the prompt if changes are needed. When everything is ready, the restaurant is launched across all Wonder locations.

An Ambitious Business Model

Currently, the company operates 120 of these "programmable cooking platforms," a number that is expected to reach 400 next year. By adding robots, the company will not necessarily reduce the number of employees, Lore noted. On the contrary, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce within a given timeframe. "We have a capacity of 7 million meals with 12 people," he said. "We see a path to reach 20 million meals in 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal is also... I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating in 2,500 square feet," Lore added.

Culinary Experimentation and Opportunities for Influencers

The goal of these AI-created "restaurants" is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reactions before adding dishes to their physical establishments, for example. Lore also sees other use cases for the platform, such as allowing influencers to connect with their audience through their own "restaurant" brands without having to actually launch their own chains.

"It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer — anyone looking to monetize their audience," Lore said. "Or it could be a personal trainer wanting to create specific bowls. It could be a nonprofit. It could be Disney to [promote] their new movie. Anyone can create a restaurant."

The Challenges of Ghost Kitchens

However, the question of whether so many people actually want this remains open. Ghost kitchens — a similar concept that promised to allow brands to sell food without owning a restaurant — faced challenges in the early 2020s, with several prominent operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to retain customers. The layer of automation and AI added by Wonder could address some of these pitfalls, but the model still needs to be proven on a large scale.

MrBeast Burger, a famous ghost kitchen experiment, starkly illustrated this challenge. The brand faced numerous complaints about inconsistent food quality — a consequence of relying on dozens of different kitchens and contracted staff. Wonder's programmable and increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly this problem.

Lore admitted that there are still limits to this idea. The Wonder team (including its robots) cannot perform tasks like stretching and tossing pizza dough or cutting and rolling sushi. Instead, Wonder focuses on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.

Acquisition Strategy and Future Vision

The entire plan revolves around Lore's other acquisitions — Grubhub for its business of 250 million deliveries per year and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on acquiring restaurant brands, such as New York-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it acquired for $6.5 million in February.

"When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then you put it overnight in 1,000 locations, there’s incredible arbitrage in that," Lore noted.