‘Nobody has automated the kitchen’: the tech billionaire disrupting restaurants

The next battle over how Americans buy meals may not be fought between delivery apps but over who controls the kitchens themselves.

Billionaire Marc Lore is betting that owning the entire process — from food production to delivery — can unlock an industry that has long resisted technological disruption.

His company, Wonder, is targeting an initial public offering as soon as next year after a recent funding round valued it at $9bn, despite not confirming whether the company has yet hit profitability.

Unlike delivery platforms such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, which connect consumers with existing restaurants, Wonder prepares food itself through a network of centralised kitchens, licensed brands and its own delivery operation.

The approach builds on the “ghost kitchen” model popularised by groups including Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens, but goes further by owning everything from the kitchen to the delivery app.

The bet is that greater control over production, logistics and technology will ultimately produce better margins in an industry where previous disruption has often struggled to deliver sustainable profits.“I was in ecommerce my whole life and we dealt with really tight margins for commodity goods, and I’m looking at the restaurant industry . . . and I’m seeing a lot of profit there,” Lore told the FT.

“Nobody has disrupted the restaurant, nobody’s automated the kitchen . . . So I thought it was a big opportunity,” he added.
Wonder, which currently operates more than 147 sites in northeastern America and will expand to Texas next year, describes itself as a “vertically integrated food platform” whose meals are cooked in its own facilities before being delivered to customers.

Wonder’s model functions through licensing, partnering or acquiring existing brands such as Bobby Flay Steak and Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken on its platform, before reproducing them — often using automated processes — in a Wonder location when ordered by consumers.

Lore, who sold his last company Jet.com to Walmart for $3.3bn in 2016, founded Wonder in 2018 and has since raised about $3bn from investors including Accel and Google Ventures.

Wonder acquired delivery app group Grubhub from Just Eat Takeaway for $650mn in 2024, a deal that gave it a nationwide courier network and millions of existing customers.But Lore has so far been unable to reverse GrubHub’s decline.

Grubhub’s US market share of total sales has declined from 7 per cent in 2024 to 5 per cent this year, according to YipitData. It had 15 per cent share in January 2021. DoorDash and Uber Eats currently have 64 per cent and 31 per cent market share respectively.

“On the Grubhub side, when we bought the company, we were buying it for the assets, and it had been declining double digits three years in a row,” Lore said. “We’ve since turned that around and we’re near back to growth on Grubhub.”

However, Lore’s vertical model has proven capital intensive, with the Wonder boss saying the company has spent more than $2.5bn in scaling its operation in the past seven years.

The company has almost 280,000 monthly active users this year, while its Grubhub wing has 6.5mn, according to figures from market research firm Sensor Tower. Both lag behind the 61.5mn people using market leader DoorDash each month.

Wonder’s model offers “clear” benefits for cutting out the third-party commissions and labour costs that often weigh on hospitality businesses, according to Dale Hunnings, a manager in the hospitality division at advisory firm HaysMac.

But its aim to maximise automation might struggle to offer the flexibility required in an industry that regularly grapples with ingredient shortages, dietary requirements and menu substitutions, he added.

Delivery economics are also not so straightforward. Many established operators, including the UK franchise of Pizza Hut, have moved away from self-delivery because they struggled to justify the costs outside high-volume city centre locations.

Hunnings said Wonder would need to “generate enough demand within each catchment area to make self-delivery materially more efficient than outsourcing”.

Lore pushed back on concerns, saying he was focused on “future unit economics, not the profit today”, adding that platform infrastructure businesses were “often misunderstood”.

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“This was Amazon’s issue, in the early days it was ‘Amazon.bomb’, I [will] never forget the news article, and it was just because they were burning a lot of cash,” he said.

Lore said Wonder’s investment in robotics and “tight delivery radius” was key in keeping fixed costs down.

The Wonder boss maintains his core markets will be those without the restaurant density of urban areas. “We do much better in suburban and less densely populated areas,” he said, pointing to lower competition from rival food outlets and Wonder’s late opening hours.

“The big vision is — in addition to making this food accessible — to go after all 21 weekly meal occasions . . . So this is not meant just to be the two days a week that you do delivery, it’s really meant to feed families every day of the week,” he said.

He added that he was also open to expanding the business internationally through a strategic partnership with an existing participant.

“If somebody wanted to license the technology and licence the brands that we own and bring that to a new country, I think we’d be very open to that,” he said.

“I think . . . this can be a household name, a trillion-dollar market-cap company in the future,” he added.