From online retail to food at scale
Marc Lore made his reputation in e-commerce rather than in restaurants. He co-founded the parent of Diapers.com, which Amazon bought for $545 million in 2010, later started Jet.com and sold it to Walmart for about $3 billion in 2016, remaining until 2021 to speed Walmart's e-commerce expansion.
He is also tied to the Minnesota Timberwolves. In 2021, Lore and Alex Rodriguez struck an agreement to purchase the team for $1.5 billion, though final completion did not come until 2025. In August, Rodriguez said Lore had made a deal to reduce his investment to a minority stake "to focus on his business," referring to Wonder.
Investors have followed him. Dave Munichiello - managing partner at Alphabet's venture capital arm GV - said, "I joke around at GV that I do enterprise software investing, AI investing and anything that Marc Lore is running as an active CEO." Lore's own pitch is simpler: "Everybody eats," he said. "It's defensible from AI."
What Wonder looks like now
Wonder started with sprinter vans outfitted with mobile kitchens, then phased them out after roughly two years in favor of brick-and-mortar sites that could expand options and cut costs. Over the last three years, 170 storefronts have opened from Virginia to Massachusetts.
Food is prepared at commissary kitchens and transported to each store, where employees unseal, cook and finish menu items. Each site runs entirely on electric power, with no gas lines or ventilation, enabling faster openings with fewer renovations and less red tape.
Menus pull from more than two dozen "restaurants," including Dabba Indian Kitchen, Tejas Barbecue and Pop Salad. Celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Michael Symon and Marcus Samuelsson get equity plus payments made in advance for licensing their names, and newer arrivals feature acquired brands like Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken and Salt Hank's.
Ghost kitchen comparisons miss the mark, Lore argues. "You can see there's a front of house [in the] brick and mortar," he said. "You'll see people at lunchtime, sitting there enjoying lunch, so it's not ghost-y in that way. But I think it's also just in the fact that we're vertically integrated." The company has cycled through "a new kind of food hall" and "modern food court" before landing on "a vertically integrated food technology platform."
Expansion, deals and AI bets
The company's acquisition outlay tops $1 billion, not counting undisclosed transactions, and includes Grubhub, Relay (a delivery and logistics provider), the meal-kit firm Blue Apron, plus buzzy New York restaurant concepts. Lore sees a "tremendous total addressable market" if Wonder can deliver high-quality meals at wallet-friendly price points, especially serving exurban and rural communities that have limited choices beyond fast food and highway gas-station fare. The company's first push into Texas is slated for next year, with a goal of no fewer than 100 sites statewide by the end of 2027.
Beginning Nov. 17, the company will debut Wonder Create, enabling creators, founders and companies to pay $10 per month to launch a "restaurant," receive AI assistance on the name, logo, pricing and recipes, and participate in revenue sharing. "It could be a restaurant for you and your friends, or you could be an influencer that has a following," Lore said. Over time, the platform will open to the public, and users will choose the menu items using Wonder's pantry as the source.
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Wonder is also building MEL, a proprietary AI platform that can use health data from devices like Oura and Whoop, or even blood biomarkers, to design breakfast, lunch and dinner. MEL isn't yet offered to Wonder customers, although Lore said he relies on AI to guide his personal meal choices.
Quality control, retention and the road to an IPO
Winning diners is the hard part. Consumers are dining out less, and while delivery is still above pre-pandemic levels, it has fallen from its Covid peak. Fees and higher delivery menu prices add to the bill.
Skeptics have aired complaints online. In late 2025, Amir Ings, a 27-year-old in Philadelphia, reviewed three tacos on TikTok and said, "It's OK, but it's just average," adding he paid about $16 for food he thought should have been closer to $8. Lore told CNBC that Wonder gets thousands of daily reviews covering taste, temperature and portion size on a 1-to-10 scale, and Munichiello said board meetings start with taste scores.
"We're maniacally focused on food quality .... We're constantly iterating on the meals that score lower," Lore said. "I do expect food quality to improve as we scale, which is not always the case."
Despite the chatter, retention looks solid. Transaction data from Indagari indicates that Wonder posted a higher weighted-average retention rate and greater lifetime value than Cava and Sweetgreen. It has also made its model work in New York. "They made this company work well in the hardest place in the country to stand up this model: New York," Munichiello said. "You have so much choice in New York."
The company is preparing for public markets. In March, Wonder hired Gabrielle Scheibe Rabinovitch, previously at Worldpay, as chief financial officer. Lore declined to comment to CNBC on IPO timing, although he has said the company will be "ready and prepared to go public early next year."
Financially, the company has been operating at a loss since buying Blue Apron and Grubhub, The Information reported. Management plans to bring meal prices down by emphasizing automation and deploying drones for delivery, a long-term cost play that will be expensive to build. Investors have grown less tolerant of growth-at-all-costs strategies, said Avery Marquez of Renaissance Capital, so unprofitable issuers need to show progress toward profits or durable growth.
The bottom line: Wonder is trying to expand locations, sharpen food scores and wire in cost-cutting tech ahead of a potential IPO. That mix, plus the Texas buildout and the planned Nov. 17 Wonder Create step, will shape how this story touches your portfolio.
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