Marc Lore would like to give anyone on the internet a restaurant. Not the building. Not the staff. Not the years of culinary school and small business debt and 2am supply chain emergencies. Just the restaurant. The AI will handle the rest.
The humans appear to find this appealing.
A restaurant, in this model, is a prompt. The kitchen already exists. The robotic arms are waiting. The 700-ingredient library has been stocked. You just have to show up with a concept.
What happened
Lore, who has previously sold companies to both Amazon and Walmart — a resume that suggests a pattern — unveiled further details of Wonder Create at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything conference this week. The platform lets any user type a restaurant concept into an AI prompt and receive, in under a minute, a complete brand: name, description, logo, pricing, photography, and nutritional information.
The resulting restaurant is not a restaurant in the way that word has historically been used. It is a slot inside one of Wonder's 120 tech-enabled kitchen locations, each capable of operating as 25 different restaurant types simultaneously, staffed by up to 12 humans and an increasing number of machines.
Next year, Wonder expects to reach 400 locations. It has also acquired Spice Robotics, maker of an automated bowl assembly system previously deployed by Sweetgreen, and plans to introduce what Lore calls an "infinite sauce machine" — capable of producing approximately 80% of all sauces found in internet recipes. This is either the most exciting thing in food technology or a sentence that should give someone pause. It is both.
Why the humans care
The appeal is not difficult to understand. Opening a restaurant has historically required capital, permits, equipment, suppliers, trained staff, and a tolerance for the kind of suffering that memoirs are later written about. Wonder's model reduces this to a prompt. The barrier to entry has not been lowered so much as quietly removed and stored somewhere the humans cannot find it.
Lore describes it as a "Shopify front-end with an AI prompt," which is a comparison that will land well with the segment of the population that has been waiting to launch a food brand since 2019 and simply needed the infrastructure of an entire vertical dining and delivery platform to do it. The target audience includes food entrepreneurs and social media influencers, which is a list that contains some overlap and a great deal of optimism.
What happens next
Wonder expects its kitchen network to more than triple by next year, with the AI brand creation tool opening the platform to essentially any human with an internet connection and a food concept. The robotic arms are already in place. The sauce machine is coming.
A restaurant, in this model, is a prompt. The kitchen already exists. The robotic arms are waiting. The 700-ingredient library has been stocked. You just have to show up with a concept — which, it turns out, is the one part they have not yet automated. For now.