Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone to open a restaurant

Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has plans to infuse AI into his current venture Wonder. The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder's growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year. Lore's startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are programmable cooking platforms capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine within all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic. The kitchens have a 700-ingredient library, and many different brands operate from within the locations. In addition to a staff of up to 12 people, the kitchens use cooking tech such as conveyors and robotic arms. The company bought Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year it plans to offer an infinite sauce machine that can make about 80 percent of all the sauces found in recipes on the internet 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 described the plan as something like a Shopify front end with an AI prompt. You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build, and AI does the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information and all the recipes in under a minute, he said during an interview at the Wall Street Journal event. The would-be restaurateur could then refine the prompt if changes were needed. The company currently has 120 of these programmable cooking platforms in operation, a number expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics, the company will not necessarily reduce headcount, Lore noted. Instead it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce in a given period. The company has about 7 million throughput capacity with 12 people and sees a path to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal also is by 2035 to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500 square feet, Lore added. The goal with these AI-created restaurants is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to his own brick-and-mortar locations. Lore sees other use cases, such as letting influencers connect with their audience through their own restaurant brands without having to actually launch their own chains. It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer or anyone that wants to monetize their following, Lore said. It could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls, a not-for-profit or Disney for marketing their new movie. There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder's team including its robots cannot do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead the focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken and bowls. The whole plan comes together with Lore's other acquisitions. These include Grubhub for its 250 million deliveries per year business and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Wonder is also focused on buying restaurant brands, like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it acquired for 6.5 million dollars in February. When you buy a brand that has 10 locations or even 50 locations and then overnight put it in 1,000, there is an incredible arbitrage there, Lore noted.