Marc Lore says AI will soon allow anyone to open a restaurant | TechCrunch

Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to integrate AI into his business. current company, Wonder.

The centerpiece of these projects is Wonder Create, an initiative that would allow anyone – from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers – to use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in less than a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live on Wonder’s growing network of tech kitchens, which currently numbers 120 and is expected to reach 400 next year.

Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated restaurant and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, however; These are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of cuisine-based restaurants, within their all-electric kitchens that are becoming increasingly robotic.

Speaking At the Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a library of 700 ingredients. The “restaurants” they house are actually made up of many different brands that operate out of these locations.

In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking technologies, such as conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also I just bought Spice Roboticsmanufacturer of an automatic bowl making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” capable of making about 80% of all the sauces found in recipes on the Internet today.

Wonder Create was announcement earlier this year to allow anyone to use Wonder software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.

Lore provided more details on how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front-end with an AI prompt.”

“You type in the type of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant – the AI ​​does it – in less than a minute. It does the name, branding, description, photos, pricing, health information and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained in an interview at the WSJ event. The future restaurant owner could then refine the prompt if changes were necessary. Once ready to go live, the restaurant would launch on all Wonder sites.

The company currently operates 120 of these “programmable cooking platforms,” a number expected to reach 400 next year. By adding robotics to the equation, the company won’t necessarily reduce its workforce, Lore noted. Instead, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can prepare in a given period.

“We have a production capacity of about 7 million people and 12 people,” he said. “We see a way to achieve 20 million throughput in 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal is also…I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating in 2,500 square feet,” Lore added.

The goal of these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experience food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to its own brick-and-mortar locations, for example.

Lore also sees other use cases for the platform, such as allowing influencers to connect with their audiences through their own “restaurant” brands without having to launch their own channels.

“It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer – anyone who wants to monetize their followers,” Lore said. “Or it could be a private trainer who wants to make specific bowls. It could be a non-profit organization. It could be Disney for [marketing] their new film. Anyone can run a restaurant.

Whether that many people actually want it is an open question. Ghost kitchens – a similar concept that promised to allow brands to sell food without owning a restaurant – fell on hard times in the early 2020s, with several high-profile operators scaling back or closing their doors after struggling to retain customers. Wonder’s additional layer of automation and AI can address some of these pitfalls, but the model is yet to be proven at scale.

MrBeast Burgera famous ghost kitchen experiment, vividly illustrates the challenge. The brand has faced numerous complaints about inconsistent food quality, a result of relying on dozens of different kitchens and contracted staff. Wonder’s programmable and increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly this problem.

There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder’s team (including its robots) can’t do things like throw and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder focuses on simpler staples like burgers, wings, fried chicken and bowls.

The entire plan is in addition to Lore’s other acquisitions – Grubhub for its activity of 250 million deliveries per year And Blue apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on buying restaurant brands, like the one based in New York. Blue Ribbon Fried Chickenwhich he acquired for $6.5 million in February.

“When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight you put it in 1,000 locations, there’s just an incredible arbitrage,” Lore noted.