How Marc Lore's Wonder Is Using Robotics, AI, and Vertical Integration to Make the Future of Food More Accessible

Would you trust a robot to make your burrito?  The chairman and CEO of startup Wonder, Marc Lore, is betting that his robots can cook a perfect steak much faster than their human counterparts, and that's not accounting for the speed achieved by his robotic kitchen.

Wonder

The mission of Wonder is to make more great food more accessible, and CEO Marc Lore is working to do just that.

Wonder is Pursuing a Bold Path Where the Future Means Food Accessibility

Wonder is pursuing a bold vision to become a vertically integrated food platform that combines restaurant brands, robotics, delivery, logistics, and AI. The company has expanded through acquisitions such as Grubhub, Blue Apron, Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, and Sweetgreen's robotics technology. Marc Lore believes automation can dramatically improve efficiency, with Wonder's new bowl-making robots capable of producing up to 500 customized bowls per hour. Long-term, Wonder aims to become a platform where entrepreneurs can launch food brands using AI-powered tools and its infrastructure.

The Future of Food Is Being Built Today: How Marc Lore and Wonder Are Reinventing Restaurants

When most people think about food delivery, they think about a restaurant making a meal and a third-party service bringing it to their door. Marc Lore sees something much bigger.

The entrepreneur who previously built and sold Diapers.com and Jet.com is now focused on transforming one of the world's largest industries: food. Through Wonder, Lore is creating what he calls a "vertically integrated food platform"—a technology-driven ecosystem designed to rethink how meals are prepared, delivered, and experienced.

At first glance, Wonder might look like another food hall or delivery service. But beneath the surface is a sophisticated operating system for food that combines restaurant brands, automation, logistics, delivery, and artificial intelligence into a single platform.

And the vision is becoming increasingly ambitious.

More Than a Restaurant Company

Wonder has spent the past several years assembling the pieces needed to create a new kind of food ecosystem. The company owns Grubhub, Blue Apron, multiple restaurant concepts, and a growing portfolio of food brands spanning everything from pizza and steak to fried chicken, salads, and Mexican bowls.

Recently, Wonder expanded its portfolio again by acquiring Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken while simultaneously launching new concepts including Pop Salad and El Diez Mexican Bowls. These additions help strengthen Wonder's strategy of offering customers a wide variety of cuisines through a single ordering experience.

The goal is simple: give consumers access to numerous restaurant brands from one kitchen, one app, and one delivery network.

For customers, that means unprecedented convenience. For Wonder, it means powerful economies of scale.

The Robot Revolution Arrives in the Kitchen

Perhaps the most exciting development is Wonder's investment in automation.

At a recent Fortune conference, Lore revealed that Wonder is deploying advanced robotic kitchen technology capable of producing up to 500 customized bowls per hour. According to Lore, a human worker might produce only 30 to 45 bowls in that same timeframe.

The technology, acquired through Wonder's purchase of Sweetgreen's Spyce robotics business, automatically assembles meals with remarkable precision. Ingredients are added according to exact customer specifications, creating consistent results while dramatically increasing throughput.

Lore described the system as producing meals with "no errors," helping ensure customers receive exactly what they ordered every time.

This isn't automation for automation's sake. It's about improving speed, consistency, scalability, and economics.

In an industry facing rising labor costs and increasing consumer expectations, that combination could become a significant competitive advantage.

Why Vertical Integration Matters

One of Lore's most compelling ideas is that Wonder controls more of the customer experience than traditional restaurant companies.

Rather than relying on separate restaurant operators, delivery networks, and technology providers, Wonder owns many of the critical pieces itself. The company controls restaurant brands, kitchen operations, delivery infrastructure, and ordering technology through Grubhub.

This integrated approach potentially allows Wonder to reduce costs while expanding into markets that might not otherwise support large standalone restaurant chains.

As Lore explained, the company can operate multiple restaurant concepts from a single location and even keep locations open later because resources are shared across the platform.

It's a strategy that resembles what Amazon did for retail and what Shopify did for e-commerce—building infrastructure that enables an entire ecosystem.

The Long-Term Vision

What makes Wonder particularly fascinating is that Lore appears to be thinking far beyond food delivery.

He recently discussed a future feature called Wonder Create, which would allow entrepreneurs to generate restaurant concepts using AI. Users could potentially create branded food businesses complete with menus, pricing, and marketing assets built on top of Wonder's infrastructure.

Lore described the concept as "Think Shopify on steroids."

If successful, Wonder could evolve from a restaurant company into a platform that enables thousands of food entrepreneurs to launch businesses without owning kitchens, hiring large staffs, or building delivery networks.

That's a fundamentally different vision than simply selling meals.

A Company Worth Watching

Wonder's success is not guaranteed. The restaurant industry remains highly competitive, and scaling a new operating model always presents challenges.

But what makes Wonder so intriguing is that Marc Lore isn't trying to build a better restaurant. He's trying to build a better food system.

By combining robotics, artificial intelligence, delivery logistics, restaurant brands, and platform economics, Wonder is attempting to create a new category altogether.

And if the company succeeds, the future of food may look very different from the one we know today.

 

Wonder Woman 1984 Movie Poster

The following post is my review of Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) movie. This post contains spoilers and will discuss elements from the movie. Please do not read this review if you are trying to avoid movie spoilers.

Wonder Woman 1984 Review

Wonder Woman 1984 Movie Details

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) is the sequel to the Wonder Woman (2017) movie and stars Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, also known as Wonder Woman. Chris Pine returns as her love interest, Steve Trevor. The antagonists in this movie are Barbara Minerva and The Cheetah (played by Kristen Wiig), and Maxwell "Max" Lord (played by Pedro Pascal). The movie was written and directed by Patty Jenkins, with screenplay credit to Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns, and Dave Callaham. Full credit for cast and crew can be viewed here. This film was released in the United States in both theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously on December 25, 2020. The film began opening in some international markets without HBO Max on December 16, 2020. 

Note: As of December 27, 2020, Wonder Woman 1984 had made $85M USD worldwide and $16.7M domestically, and was given a greenlight to make a third movie, with Patty Jenkins in charge to create.

Wonder Woman 1984 Review: Themes, Story, and Plot

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) is a movie about many things, the biggest themes are about love and greed, and attaining power that one does not deserve at the expense of others. 

The movie opens during athletic games in a large colosseum in her native Themyscira, where we see a young Diana Prince competing against Amazonian women in their 20's, and doing well ahead of everyone. But she encounters a setback while on horseback, and young Diana attempts to get back into the race by taking a shortcut. When taking the shortcut, she misses her blue checkpoint, and her Aunt Antiope stops her at the end from throwing her javelin through the last hoop. Her Aunt is teaching young Diana a life lesson and tells her that she can't take shortcuts and win fairly.

The film then fast forwards 66 years to 1984 for the rest of the movie.

Diana Prince is working as an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. when not fighting crime in secret as Wonder Woman. There she meets Barbara Minerva, a woman that is clumsy, insecure, and lonely. At first, Diana doesn't care much to hang out with Barbara, but after Diana learns more about the "Dreamstone" being researched by Barbara, Diana takes up Barbara on going out for dinner and gets to know her. After Diana reads the Latin inscription on the relic, she reads out loud how it grants wishes, and she wishes in her mind to have her former lover Steve Trevor back.

The wind blows when the Dreamstone is granting a wish, and shortly after, Steve Trevor shows up in the movie, after embodying some random man in the movie. How Steve does this is not explained sufficiently. Then we see many scenes of Steve trying to acclimate to life in 1984. Meanwhile, Barbara Minerva first wishes she was like Diana and gains agility and strength, like Wonder Woman. An unsuccessful businessman, Max Lord, then discovers the Dreamstone in Barbara's possession, and recognizes it very well, as if he was very familiar with it. He then seduces Barbara and convinces her to let him look at it for further examination. His wish upon the stone is to become the Dreamstone. He then begins granting wishes to everyone, in exchange for whatever he wants. As he grants more and more wishes, it takes a toll on his body, He knows this and says that he can always take health from someone later on after he gains great power in the process.

As Diana and Steve are trying to locate Max Lord, she starts to realize that she is weaker, and her powers are suffering because of her wish to have Steve. They together learn that to stop the chaos taking place on the Earth, everyone that wished upon the Dreamstone must renounce their wish, in order for everything to be restored on the Earth. Diana has a touching final goodbye with Steve because she realizes that she cannot keep him forever, and she needs her powers to face Max Lord, and The Cheetah. 

Diana then puts on her ultimate winged suit of armor and flies to the location where a technologically advanced studio is located. She first faced off with The Cheetah, after Barbara gets additional powers from Max Lord on the jet on the way over. Diana and The Cheetah fight and Wonder Woman subdues The Cheetah with electricity and moves into the studio to confront Max Lord, who is granting everyone wishes in exchange for power.

Diana's ultimate scene with Max Lord is in a 360-degree studio that allows him to "touch" everyone in the world while granting their wishes. This plot point of how it works exactly (the movie science behind it) is not sufficient. Diana manages to get close enough to Max Lord with the Lasso of Truth so that she can speak truth to the world while he is roped, and the world starts to renounce their selfish wishes. The world starts to do this leading up unto Max Lord himself renouncing his wish so that he can save his son that has wandered into a chaotic and dangerous world. He runs out and finds his son, and shortly after is seen embracing his son and telling his son the truth about his rise to power.

This movie may not win many awards, but I liked that greed was addressed. The story is similar to King Midas, who could turn anything he wanted into gold. The main point is that great power gained with unscrupulous means will end very badly. I also liked the theme of love. Diana had everything she wanted in life, except love. She missed Steve very badly. And for Barbara Minerva, she wanted to be popular and liked but lost her kindness and compassion along the way.