Great Food Doesn’t Scale…Until it Does: Wonder’s Big Swing at Reshaping the Restaurant and Delivery Model
To many, Marc Lore is a familiar name. Marc founded Jet.com, which was acquired by Walmart, and before that Diapers.com, which was acquired by Amazon. He is undisputedly one of the most talented and ambitious entrepreneurs when it comes to reshaping commerce that meets new consumer preferences.
That’s why when we had the opportunity to invest in Wonder, Marc’s newest venture and a fundamentally new model for great food and meal planning at scale, we were immediately interested in what this opportunity could hold. Fast forward to today: the Wonder team is fiercely executing on building a unique concept for quick-service restaurants, food delivery, and food production that caters to consumers’ desire for excellent, affordable food with the convenience and speed of delivery, and chefs’ desire to reinvent their menus to meet these preferences.
In tech, using technology to scale great food is an unrealized pursuit that the industry has danced around for years. Delivery services (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, etc.) have become massive businesses because of the sheer demand, even though they are plagued by high consumer fees and, often, contentious relationships with restaurants, which often have to take a significant cut in order to pay for these services, which can be disruptive to their core operations. Not to mention, most restaurant food is not optimized to travel and can look and taste less than desirable when it arrives at your door.
On the other hand, platforms that have attempted to vertically integrate and own the entire culinary operation have ultimately been unable to overcome the tough unit economics paired with the challenges of a highly sensitive production process. After all, food is arguably the most personal, subjective product that consumers pay for on a daily basis. The margin of error is severe.
Perhaps it takes someone as uniquely ambitious and visionary as Marc to take a swing at reimagining the restaurant and delivery model on a cellular level. Wonder's initial entry point is both very powerful and differentiated: a highly efficient platform for producing and distributing excellent meals, where chefs get to indulge the creative process and see their creations scale in ways they never thought possible.
A recent feature Eater notes:
“It’s tempting to lump Wonder into the space of ghost kitchen or delivery-only concepts that have come and gone since before the pandemic, but its partner chefs say this business is different. It’s the same selling point as the early days of delivery app Caviar, when it offered a premium product — takeout from higher-end restaurants — in a marketplace that’s otherwise about unlimited options, not curation.”
Here’s a snapshot of how Wonder works today:
- It partners with popular chefs and restaurants from across the country to produce recipes (or even create new exclusive concepts specifically for Wonder’s model).
- Alongside the chefs, Wonder’s team works painstakingly to develop and refine a menu down to the microgram of each recipe (quite literally, a millionth of a gram) to ensure creations are not just expertly balanced but completely repeatable at scale.
- All items are designed to be prepared quickly using only a rapid-cook oven, a water bath, or a fryer. This enables Wonder tremendous efficiency: its kitchens can be as small as 750 square feet, with each location serving food from up to 30 restaurant concepts (indeed, everyone can order whatever they’d like).
- A customer can opt for pick-up or delivery from one of Wonder’s locations and choose from a seared salmon by Bobby Flay, samosas from Chef Meherwan Irani, a Sushi Nichi rainbow roll, Di Fara Pizza, a poke bowl, or paella by José Andrés.
- Delivery is fulfilled by a mix of employees and third-party couriers to deliver within a tight radius, and the company’s recent acquisition of Relay will mean even more capacity for fulfilling orders quickly and affordably.
Wonder is still relatively early on its journey in the context of what it’s out to achieve. But if there were ever a signal of its positioning for success, it's the enthusiasm of critically acclaimed chefs, who have built and bet their entire careers on maintaining the excellence of their products for consumers.
Chef JJ Johnson, an up-and-coming name in New York’s culinary scene and a close early partner of Wonder, says, “I was shocked they got it to be that good. It’s going to be very successful, because they’ve done the groundwork. It’s something I talk to Bobby Flay about all the time. He’s like, ‘I wish I had a Marc Lore at your age.’”
Over time, Wonder’s proprietary format can expand beyond chef-prepared food halls into adjacent concepts that get the best quality meals into people’s homes. But for now, if you’re in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania, check out one of Wonder’s 12 — soon to be 75+ — locations.