Marc Lore wants you to run a restaurant. Not cook. Not hire. Not sign a lease. Type a sentence into a box.
Wonder Create reportedly spits out a name, menu, pricing, photos and nutrition info in about two minutes. Going live costs $10 a month. That is less than the garlic bread at most restaurants.
Your new empire arrives with no kitchen, no staff and no dining room. Wonder cooks the food. Wonder delivers it. You supply a prompt and the confidence of a man who once bought call options on a Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Texas plan is real. Wonder wants more than 100 locations there by the end of 2027. Drone delivery in the barbecue capital of America is also on the menu. Lore is bringing robot salad to brisket country. Texas will respond the way Texas always responds to Northeastern food innovations.
The robots come from Sweetgreen. Wonder paid $186.4 million for its Spyce division and the Infinite Kitchen. Sweetgreen built a machine that makes bowls, then sold it to a man who plans to make everything else autonomous by 2040. Sauces and beverages are next.
The money is serious. Wonder raised $650 million in July at a $9 billion valuation. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest joined the round. Lore has spent over $1 billion on acquisitions, including Grubhub and Blue Apron. Blue Apron. A company that sent you a box of carrots and a guilt trip now sits inside a robot food empire.
Lore declined to give CNBC an IPO date. He has said Wonder will be ready to go public early next year. Translation: retail gets the bag around the time the robots learn to make sauce.
Picture the roadshow. Slide one: 26 restaurant brands. Slide two: three employees running all of them at night. Slide three: you, a retail trader, naming your own ghost kitchen "Bulls Eye Burritos" at 2 a.m.
You will buy the IPO. You will build the restaurant. You will be your own customer.
That is not a business model. That is a hostage situation with a delivery fee waiver.
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