Wonder Develops AI and Infrastructure to Automate Restaurant Launches

Wonder plans to offer an artificial intelligence tool that will enable people to create restaurants that will operate through Wonder’s existing infrastructure that offers meals from different restaurants within each location.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything event, Wonder founder and CEO Marc Lore said Wonder will enable this with its locations that are equipped with a “programmable cooking platform” that currently cooks meals from 25 restaurants.

The AI tool that Wonder plans to roll out by the end of the year will build a restaurant based on the customer’s description of what they want. The AI will create the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information and recipes. The new restaurant will then go live at Wonder locations.

Lore said the customers using this service could be “anybody that has the ability to drive demand.”

“It could be a mega influencer, anyone that wants to monetize their following, or it could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls,” Lore said. “It could be a not-for-profit. It could be Disney for their new movie. Anybody can make a restaurant.”

Lore added that people could build restaurants for their own families.

Wonder currently offers brick-and-mortar stores in which the front of house has 10 or 20 seats and a fast casual look, while the back has the programmable cooking platform that cook meals from 25 restaurants offering a variety of cuisine, Lore said.

The company has 120 locations today and aims to have 400 next year and 1,000 by 2035.

“Now it’s really about adding more automation to the back of house to get better consistency, higher throughput, better quality food, and then to open up the aperture so that Wonder creators at the end of this year can start building their own restaurants on the Wonder platform,” Lore said.

PYMNTS reported in December 2021 that Lore, who previously founded Jet.com and served as Walmart U.S. eCommerce president and CEO, launched Wonder as a mobile “on-demand home dining” experience that combined food trucks and ghost kitchens and signed deals with top chefs to bring gourmet kitchens to customers’ doors.