Marc Lore says artificial intelligence will soon enable anyone to open a restaurant

Marc Lore, a veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who has sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into his current venture, Wonder.

The centerpiece of these plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would allow anyone — from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers — to use artificial intelligence to design and launch their own restaurant brand in less than a minute. The virtual restaurant will then be operated across Wonder’s growing network of technology-enabled kitchen locations, which currently number 120 and are expected to reach 400 in the next year.

Startup Lore, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks into 10- to 20-seat fast-casual restaurants. These are no ordinary restaurants, though; They are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on the cuisine, within their all-electric and increasingly robotic kitchens.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Loer said these kitchens contain a library of 700 ingredients. The “restaurants” they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these 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 cooking process. The company also just purchased Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to introduce an “infinite sauce machine” that can make about 80% of all the sauces found in online recipes today.

Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to use Wonder’s software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.

Lore offered more details on how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front-end with an AI router.”

“You write the type of restaurant you want to build,” Lore explained during an interview at a Wall Street Journal event. “It builds the restaurant — the artificial intelligence — in less than a minute. It does the name, the brand, the description, the pictures, the pricing, the health information, all the recipes for your restaurant.” The potential restaurant owner can then refine the claim if changes are needed. When the restaurant is ready to go live, it will launch at all Wonder’s locations.

The company currently has 120 “programmable cooking platforms” in operation, a number expected to rise to 400 next year. Lore noted that with robots added to the equation, the company won’t necessarily reduce headcount. Instead, this will increase the number of meals the kitchen can produce in a given period.

“We have about 7 million production capacity with 12 people,” he said. “We see a path to getting to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal is also…I think by 2035, we will have 1,000 unique restaurants operating in 2,500 square feet,” Lore added.

The goal of these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experience food in new ways. A restaurateur can test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to his own locations, for example.

Lore sees other use cases for the platform as well, such as allowing influencers to connect with their audience through their own “restaurant” brands without having to actually launch their own chains.

“It can be a macro influencer or a micro influencer — anyone who wants to monetize their followers,” Lore said. “Or it could be a private trainer who wants to make certain bowls. It could be a non-profit. It could be Disney’s company.” [marketing] Their new movie. “Anyone can make a restaurant.”

Whether many people actually want it is an open question. Ghost kitchens – a similar concept that promised to allow brands to sell food without owning a restaurant – had a rough ride in the early 2020s, with many high-profile operators downsizing or closing their doors after struggling to build customer loyalty. The layer of automation and AI that Wonder has added may address some of these risks, but the model is still not widely proven.

Mr. Beast Burger, one of the famous ghost kitchen experiments, made the challenge clear. The brand has faced widespread complaints about inconsistent food quality – the result of relying on dozens of different kitchens and contract employees. Programmable and increasingly automated Wonder Kitchens are designed to solve exactly this problem.

Lohr acknowledged that there are still limits to this idea. The Wonder team (including its robots) can’t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or cut and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder’s focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.

The entire plan comes alongside other acquisitions Lore has made — Grubhub for its 250 million annual deliveries business and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focusing on buying restaurant brands, such as New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it acquired for $6.5 million in February.

“When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight you put it into 1,000 locations, there’s an incredible arbitrage there,” Lore noted.