Wonder launches AI tool to automate restaurant creation

Wonder, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has introduced Wonder Create. The tool is an AI-driven software that allows users to design and launch a restaurant brand in under a minute. Once created, these virtual brands will operate across the company’s network of 120 kitchens. The tool generates the restaurant’s name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information, and recipes based on user prompts.

The company is scaling its “programmable cooking platforms”—Wonder’s term for its automated kitchen locations—with plans to expand from its current 120 locations to an expected 400 next year. These kitchens, which currently feature 10 to 20 seats for fast-casual dining, can operate as 25 different types of restaurants using a 700-ingredient library. To maintain consistency, Wonder is integrating robotics into its operations. The company recently acquired Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, Wonder also plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make about 80% of all recipes found on the internet.

Each kitchen operates with a staff of 12 employees. Founder Marc Lore stated that the kitchens currently have about 7 million throughput capacity, with a path to reach 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. Lore aims to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500-square-foot spaces by 2035, though he characterized this target year as a guess. To fuel this expansion, Wonder has acquired other food businesses, including the meal kit company Blue Apron, delivery service Grubhub (which handles 250 million deliveries per year), and New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it acquired for $6.5 million in February.

This automated model aims to bypass the quality control issues that disrupted the ghost kitchen era—delivery-only restaurant models—of the early 2020s. For example, MrBeast Burger, a famous ghost kitchen experiment, illustrated these challenges when the brand faced widespread complaints over inconsistent food quality. Wonder’s automated kitchens are designed to prevent these issues, allowing influencers, non-profits, or businesses to launch brands easily. “When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight put it in 1,000, there’s just an incredible arbitrage there,” said Marc Lore, Founder. However, the model remains unproven at scale, and the kitchens still face physical limits, as they cannot perform tasks like tossing pizza dough or rolling sushi.

Why it matters

Wonder is attempting to scale a vertically integrated dining platform by using AI to automate the creation of restaurant brands, aiming to solve the consistency issues that plagued previous ghost kitchen models.