As CNBC reported Sunday (Oct. 25), the company is also eyeing an “aggressive” expansion in Texas and a subscription program that allows diners to operate their own “restaurants.”
Launched in 2018, Wonder lets diners place takeout or delivery orders from its food hall-style locations via its third-party platforms, including Grubhub, which Wonder acquired from JustEatTakeaway in 2024.
As founder Marc Lore told CNBC, “Wonder is a vertically integrated food technology platform to make great food more accessible.”
According to the report, Wonder aims to achieve its goal by opening locations around the country in urban, suburban and rural settings, while also planning to keep prices lower than the cost of having groceries delivered.
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The company’s ownership of Grubhub means Wonder customers who order via the app don’t have to pay delivery fees, while its menu prices aren’t increased to cover the cost of commission fees to the delivery platform, the report said.
Beyond that Wonder is automating some of its kitchen functions, with the goal of having fully autonomous food preparation and delivery by 2040, Lore said.
Lore described Wonder’s create-your-own-restaurant vision earlier this year at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything event, describing the company establishing locations equipped with a “programmable cooking platform” that now cooks meals from 25 restaurants.
“The AI tool that Wonder plans will build a restaurant based on the customer’s description of what they want,” PYMNTS wrote. “The AI will create the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information and recipes. The new restaurant will then go live at Wonder locations.”
The CNBC report said Wonder could soon be pitching investors on an initial public offering (IPO) road show, provided that the window for companies across sectors to list reopens in the months to come.
″[The mission] is really why I want to go public and raise the capital that it’ll take to build that kind of generational business, also to have a public currency to be able to do more M&A,” Lore said. “But I can’t talk about timing.”
PYMNTS spoke in 2024 with Wonder then-Chief Growth and Marketing Officer Daniel Shlossman about the company’s collaboration with Walmart. He argued it helps Wonder link restaurant ordering opportunities to customers’’ grocery and retail shopping habits.
“We do expect customers to place orders maybe when they are heading into the Walmart, and the food is going to be right there ready for them for pickup when they’re leaving,” he said. “We also see people that are maybe in the middle of running errands, and they’ve just made their Walmart run, and they can stop off and have a bite before they head to their next destination.”
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