{"id":471013,"date":"2026-05-06T09:26:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T09:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/471013\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T09:26:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T09:26:12","slug":"marc-lore-says-that-ai-will-soon-enable-anyone-open-a-restaurant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/471013\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone open a restaurant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to infuse AI into his current venture<\/a>, Wonder<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone \u2014 from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers \u2014 use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder\u2019s growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year.<\/p>\n

Lore\u2019s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, though; they are \u201cprogrammable cooking platforms\u201d capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine, within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic.<\/p>\n

Speaking<\/a> at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s \u201cFuture of Everything\u201d conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a 700-ingredient library. The \u201crestaurants\u201d they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these locations.<\/p>\n

In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking tech, like conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also just bought Spice Robotics<\/a>, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to offer an \u201cinfinite sauce machine\u201d that can make bout 80% of all the sauces found in recipes on the internet today.<\/p>\n

Wonder Create was announced<\/a> earlier this year as a way for anyone to use Wonder\u2019s software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.<\/p>\n

Lore offered more details as how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a \u201cShopify front-end with an AI prompt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cYou type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant \u2014 AI does \u2014 in under a minute. It does the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,\u201d Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. The would-be restaurateur could then refine the prompt if changes were needed. When ready to go live, the restaurant would launch across all of Wonder\u2019s locations. <\/p>\n

The company currently has 120 of these \u201cprogrammable cooking platforms\u201d in operation, a number that\u2019s expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics to the equation, the company won\u2019t necessarily reduce headcount, Lore noted. Instead, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce in a given period.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have about 7 million throughput capacity with 12 people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe see a path to getting to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal also is\u2026I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500 square feet,\u201d Lore added.<\/p>\n

The goal with these AI-created \u201crestaurants\u201d 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, for example.<\/p>\n

Lore sees other use cases for the platform, too, like letting influencers connect with their audience through their own \u201crestaurant\u201d brands without having to actually launch their own chains.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer \u2014 anyone that wants to monetize their following,\u201d Lore said. \u201cOr it could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls. It could be a not-for-profit. It could be Disney for [marketing] their new movie. Anybody can make a restaurant.\u201d <\/p>\n

Whether that many people actually want to is an open question. Ghost kitchens \u2014 a similar concept that promised to let brands sell food without owning a restaurant \u2014 had a rocky run in the early 2020s, with several high-profile operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder\u2019s added layer of automation and AI may address some of those pitfalls, but the model is still unproven at scale.<\/p>\n

MrBeast Burger<\/a>, a famous ghost kitchen experiments, vividly illustrated the challenge. The brand faced widespread complaints over inconsistent food quality \u2014 a consequence of relying on dozens of different contracted kitchens and staff. Wonder\u2019s programmable, increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly that problem.<\/p>\n

There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder\u2019s team (including its robots) can\u2019t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder\u2019s focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.<\/p>\n

The whole plan comes together with Lore\u2019s other acquisitions \u2014 Grubhub for its 250 million-deliveries-per-year business<\/a> and Blue Apron<\/a> for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on buying restaurant brands, like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken<\/a>, which it snapped up for $6.5 million in February.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you buy a brand \u2014 and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations \u2014 and then overnight put it in 1,000, there\u2019s just an incredible arbitrage there,\u201d Lore noted. <\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,10080,18,518,148205,19,17,130479,206636,1222,82,206637],"class_list":{"0":"post-471013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-cooking","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-food","14":"tag-grubhub","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-marc-lore","18":"tag-resaturants","19":"tag-robotics","20":"tag-technology","21":"tag-wonder"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116526919541556511","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}