Influencers programming food robots goes too far.
Everyone has a line. I’ve found mine, and it's influencer-driven, AI-crafted virtual restaurant brands where robots make the food.
In a story posted last Thursday, Bloomberg cast a critical eye on Wonder, the well-funded convenience food play that’s made more headlines for its acquisition spree than it has for its food1. But in a recent interview, Wonder CEO Marc Lore floated a just-plausible-enough idea that shows where the company’s probably headed and… I don’t like it.
Recently, Wonder spent $186 million (including $100 million in cash) on bowl-making robotics technology from Sweetgreen. Sweetgreen bought the tech when it was a restaurant called Spyce Kitchen in 2021 for $70 million. Spyce’s creators joined Sweetgreen to keep building the bots, renaming it the Infinite Kitchen.
Wonder runs a bunch of storefronts containing multiple restaurant brands in the northeast US, most clustered in and just outside New York City. Its acquisitions include meal kit company Blue Apron, delivery service Relay, ailing third-party delivery service Grubhub, and food media company Tastemade. Its ambitious founder, Marc Lore, has not been shy about his plans to scale the company into something exceptional. Automation, including the Infinite Kitchen but also automated fryers and woks and probably more, is critical to its success developing, promoting, and producing food from as many restaurant brands as possible.
“The kitchen looks more like a micro-fulfillment center than it does a kitchen,” Lore explained when I spoke to him for an interview about a year ago.
Wonder’s kitchens are outfitted with impressive high-tech cooking tools meant to quickly replicate restaurant-quality meals. People are amazed by how fast and how well the tools can pump out well-cooked food, Lore told me. As proof he offered an anecdote: when Wonder cooked a steak for celebrity chef Bobby Flay, he said, Flay “invested a million bucks on the spot.” (The company has raised over $2 billion to date.)
But there’s a new detail in this latest story that I hadn’t heard yet, and, readers, I think this goes too far:
[Lore] then described a new business called Wonder Create that would allow anyone—a first-time entrepreneur, a restaurateur who wants to test an idea, someone who has a lot of followers on Instagram—to use Wonder’s software to hatch a restaurant brand and recipes. These recipes can be programmed into Wonder’s automated kitchens, which will make and then sell them through the Wonder app. The influencer never has to slice a single tomato.
The first Create concept, Bloomberg reports, goes live this fall. Wonder is working closely with the first group of creators but could then let the algorithms take over, giving anyone the power to spin up a restaurant brand.
“You’re literally going to be able to build a restaurant in a matter of minutes,” Lore told Bloomberg.
And this is… good?