Marc Lore Predicts AI Will Democratize Restaurant Ownership

Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has ambitious plans to integrate AI into his current venture, Wonder.

The centerpiece of this strategy is Wonder Create, an initiative designed to enable anyone—from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers—to use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. These virtual restaurants would then become operational across Wonder's expanding network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, which currently number 120 and are projected to reach 400 next year.

Lore's startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast-casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. However, these are not conventional restaurants; they are "programmable cooking platforms" capable of functioning as 25 different types of cuisine-specific restaurants, all within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly incorporating robotics.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's "Future of Everything" conference this week, Lore explained that these kitchens utilize a library of 700 ingredients. The "restaurants" operating within them actually consist of numerous distinct brands running from the same physical locations.

In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking technology such as conveyors and robotic arms is involved in the food preparation process. The company recently acquired Spice Robotics, a manufacturer of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, Wonder plans to introduce an "infinite sauce machine" capable of producing approximately 80% of all the sauces found in online recipes today.

Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a platform allowing anyone to use Wonder's software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.

Lore elaborated on how this would function by leveraging AI technology, describing the concept as akin to a "Shopify front-end with an AI prompt."

"You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. The AI constructs the restaurant—including the name, branding, description, images, pricing, health information, and all the recipes—in under a minute," Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. The aspiring restaurateur could then refine the AI's output if adjustments were needed. Once finalized, the restaurant would launch across all of Wonder's locations.

The company currently operates 120 of these "programmable cooking platforms," a number expected to grow to 400 next year. As robotics are integrated, Lore noted that the company does not necessarily plan to reduce headcount. Instead, the automation will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce within a given timeframe.

"We currently achieve about 7 million meals in throughput capacity with 12 people," he said. "We see a path to reaching 20 million meals in throughput from a 2,500-square-foot space with just 12 people. The goal, by 2035, is to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of that same 2,500 square feet," Lore added.

The objective with these AI-generated "restaurants" is to enable people to experiment with food concepts in novel ways. For example, a restaurateur could test new recipes to gauge customer response before introducing them to their own physical locations.

Lore envisions other applications for the platform, such as allowing influencers to connect with their audience through their own "restaurant" brands without the need to establish actual physical chains.

"It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer—anyone who wants to monetize their following," Lore said. "Or it could be a personal trainer who wants to create specific meal bowls. It could be a non-profit organization. It could be Disney marketing a new movie. Essentially, anybody can create a restaurant."

Whether a significant number of people will actually want to do so remains an open question. Ghost kitchens—a similar concept that promised to let brands sell food without operating a traditional restaurant—faced challenges in the early 2020s, with several prominent operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder's added layer of automation and AI may help address some of these pitfalls, but the model's success at scale is yet to be proven.

The MrBeast Burger experiment, a famous ghost kitchen venture, vividly illustrated these challenges. The brand encountered widespread complaints regarding inconsistent food quality—a direct consequence of relying on dozens of different contracted kitchens and staff. Wonder's programmable, increasingly automated kitchens are specifically designed to solve this exact problem.

Lore acknowledged there are still limits to this model. Wonder's team (including its robots) cannot perform tasks like tossing pizza dough or rolling sushi. Instead, Wonder's focus is on simpler menu items such as burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.

This comprehensive plan aligns with Lore's other acquisitions—Grubhub for its business handling 250 million deliveries per year and Blue Apron for its meal kit operations. Wonder is now concentrating on acquiring established restaurant brands, such as New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it purchased for $6.5 million in February.

"When you acquire a brand—whether it has 10 locations or even 50 locations—and can then deploy it across 1,000 locations overnight, there is an incredible arbitrage opportunity there," Lore noted.