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

Marc Lore, a veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to incorporate AI into his strategy. what is happening now, I wonder.

The main focus of these plans is Wonder Create, a system that will allow anyone – from food marketers to social media enthusiasts – to use AI to design and launch their restaurant in less than a minute. The stylish restaurant can accommodate Wonder’s state-of-the-art kitchens, which currently number 120 and are expected to reach 400 next year.

The start of Lore, a combined restaurant and caterer, has evolved from a food truck to a casual restaurant with 10 to 20 seats. This is not a casual restaurant, though; is a “ready-to-eat kitchen” that can serve up to 25 different take-out restaurants, within their ever-expanding all-electric kitchen.

Speaking At The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of All” conference this week, Lore said the kitchens have a library of 700 items. The “restaurants” they live in have many different brands that work in these areas.

In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking technology, such as conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. So does the company I just bought a Spice Roboticthe maker of the dishwasher that was originally used by Sweetgreen. Next year, they plan to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make about 80% of all the sauces found in online recipes today.

Wonder Create was he announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to use the Wonder app to launch their own brand of food and recipes.

Lore provided details on how this will use AI technology, describing the plan as “Shopify forward with the speed of AI.”

“You type in the restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant – AI does it – within a minute. It lists the name, logo, description, photos, prices, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. An aspiring restaurateur is able to quickly adjust if changes are needed. When it’s ready to go live, the restaurant will open to the rest of the Wonder area.

The company currently has 120 of these “cooking platforms” in operation, a number that is expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics to the equation, the company won’t reduce human capital, Lore said. In fact, this will increase the amount of food that the kitchen can produce in a timely manner.

“We have about 7 million people with 12 people,” he said. “We see a way to go from 2,500 square feet to 20 million with just 12 people. The goal is also… I think by 2035, we will have 1,000 specialty restaurants between 2,500 square feet,” added Lore.

The purpose of these AI-powered “restaurants” is to allow people to try food in new ways. A restaurant manager can test recipes to see what customers want before adding a dish to his brick-and-mortar location, for example.

Lore also sees other uses for the platform, such as allowing influencers to connect with their audience through their own “feed” models without establishing their own chains.

“They can be mega-influencers, micro-influencers — anyone who wants to monetize their following,” Lore said. “Or it could be an ordinary teacher who wants to make certain dishes. It could be for nothing. It could be Disney for (promoting) their new movie. Anyone can create a restaurant.”

Whether many people want to do so is an open question. Ghost Kitchens – a similar concept that promised to allow a brand to sell food without having a restaurant – had a problem in the early 2020s, when many high-end operators withdrew or closed after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder’s augmented reality of automation and AI can handle some of the challenges, but the model has yet to be proven at scale.

Mr. Beast Burgera well-known ghost kitchen expert, perfectly illustrated the problem. The brand faced many complaints due to food inconsistencies – caused by its reliance on kitchens and large numbers of contracted workers. Wonder’s programmable, multi-function kitchen was designed to solve this problem.

There are limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder’s team (including its robots) can’t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or cut and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder’s focus is on simple things like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.

The whole system comes with some Lore items – Grubhub for its 250 million annual delivery business and Blue Apron about his food processing business. Now, Wonder is focusing on buying restaurants, like the New York City-based one Blue Ribbon Fried Chickenwhich cost $6.5 million in February.

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