Wonder describes itself as a vertically integrated food technology platform. That description is accurate, but from a hospitality and catering perspective it misses what may be the most interesting part of the business: Wonder operates restaurants and is increasingly developing and acquiring technology to change how those restaurants operate.
The company was founded by Marc Lore, whose previous experience gives some authority to what he is now attempting. Lore founded online retailer Jet.com, which Walmart acquired in 2016 for approximately $3 billion in cash and a further $300 million in Walmart shares. He subsequently became President and CEO of Walmart US eCommerce. (Walmart)
He is now applying much of that experience of technology and scale to foodservice.
Wonder operates more than 150 physical locations, with individual kitchens capable of producing food from more than 20 restaurant concepts under one roof. It also owns Grubhub, acquired from Just Eat Takeaway.com in January 2025 following an agreement valuing the business at an enterprise value of $650 million. (Grubhub)
So, while technology sits at the heart of Wonder, this is also very clearly an operating business. Its people run kitchens, manage restaurants, produce food, serve customers and deal every day with the realities of labour, food cost, consistency, throughput, equipment and space.
That distinction becomes increasingly relevant as Wonder invests more heavily in AI, robotics and automation.
In July, the company raised $650 million at a pre-money valuation of $9 billion, saying the investment would support continued physical expansion alongside further investment in technology, robotics and artificial intelligence. At that point its estate had grown from 46 locations in May 2025 to 140, and it has since passed 150. (Wonder)
Wonder is therefore not simply developing technology it hopes other restaurant operators might buy. It increasingly has the ability to develop, acquire and apply technology against the operating challenges it encounters within a substantial restaurant business of its own.
Its kitchens provide plenty of those challenges.
Jason Rusk, Wonder’s Executive Vice President of Restaurant Operations, has described how a team member might move from making a panini to a steak, then a burrito, pizza and beverage, all within a few minutes.
A conventional restaurant kitchen benefits from people repeatedly making food from the same menu, becoming familiar with the ingredients, equipment and processes involved. Wonder’s model is very different. Bringing more than 20 restaurant concepts together in one kitchen requires recipes, equipment, systems and workflows that make considerable complexity relatively straightforward for people to execute consistently. (Wonder)
Seen in that context, Wonder’s acquisition of Spyce and its Infinite Kitchen technology from Sweetgreen in December 2025 becomes particularly interesting.
The transaction was valued at $186.4 million, comprising $100 million in cash and Wonder shares valued at $86.4 million. Sweetgreen retained access to Infinite Kitchen through long-term licensing, supply and service agreements under which Wonder continues to provide and support the equipment. (US Securities and Exchange Commission)
By the end of Sweetgreen’s 2025 financial year, 30 of its restaurants were already operating Infinite Kitchen systems, so Wonder acquired technology with a history of working inside commercial restaurants rather than something waiting to move beyond development.
Wonder does therefore sell restaurant automation technology externally, most obviously through its continuing relationship with Sweetgreen, but there is little indication that its primary ambition is to become a conventional equipment or robotics supplier.
What seems more significant is what it plans to do with the technology inside its own business.
Following the Spyce acquisition, Wonder said it intended to introduce Infinite Kitchen into one of its Manhattan locations during 2026 and was aiming to install the technology in half of its new kitchens from 2027. (Food On Demand)
That moves the discussion from theory into restaurant operations.
Wonder is also recruiting specifically around the integration of robotics into those operations. A current Culinary Operations Manager role within its robotics team includes working between engineers and restaurant operators to integrate new robotic systems into existing workflows, measure throughput and develop equipment for areas including sauces and ingredient preparation. (Wonder careers)
The relationship between the people developing the technology and those using it is potentially important.
A restaurant technology supplier can learn from customers. Wonder can put technology into its own kitchens, watch how its own teams use it, change what does not work and apply that learning to the next kitchen it builds.
Rusk has spoken about spending time inside Wonder restaurants for precisely this reason, observing operational realities that do not necessarily appear through data and dashboards.
Marc Lore’s approach to robotics also seems notably practical.
Rather than waiting for humanoid robots capable of reproducing everything a person currently does in a kitchen, he has spoken about specialist systems for sauces, beverages, ingredient retrieval, ovens and frying, gradually automating individual processes where the economics make sense.
The logic is relatively simple.
If the requirement is to automate frying, developing an extremely sophisticated humanoid capable of standing in front of a conventional fryer and reproducing the movements of a person may be an unnecessarily difficult way of solving the problem. Redesigning the frying process itself could be considerably simpler.
Lore has been particularly cautious about work requiring anything approaching the dexterity of a human hand. Rolling a burrito or assembling a burger, for example, remain jobs for people at Wonder, and he has suggested that humanoids capable of carrying out such work economically may still be at least a decade away. (Semafor)
That caution is notable given the current levels of attention being given to humanoid robotics.
A recent Reuters investigation into China’s rapidly developing humanoid industry found enormous investment and increasing manufacturing capability, alongside continuing problems with dexterity, reliability, intelligence and cost. The gap between an impressive demonstration and a machine capable of performing useful work reliably and economically remains considerable. (Reuters)
Wonder’s approach does not depend upon waiting for that gap to close.
Instead of asking when one machine will be capable of performing everything someone working in a kitchen can do, it is examining the numerous individual processes taking place in that kitchen and asking which might be done differently.
For hospitality and catering operators, this may be where the nearer-term opportunity in robotics becomes much more relevant.
Lore has described Wonder’s kitchens as programmable cooking platforms and has spoken openly about using robotics and automation to increase substantially the amount of food each kitchen can produce without a corresponding increase in staffing.
In May he described a route through which Infinite Kitchen and further automation could enable the same kitchen workforce to handle around three times the existing volume. That remains an ambition rather than a demonstrated outcome, but it makes the objective clear. (Semafor)
If it can be achieved, the significance is not the robot. It is the change in the relationship between kitchen space, labour and productive capacity.
The same thinking is increasingly evident once food leaves the kitchen.
Through its ownership of Grubhub, Wonder also controls a substantial ordering and delivery marketplace. In August it announced an agreement with Serve Robotics providing autonomous pavement delivery through Grubhub from participating restaurants in Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as from Wonder’s own Potomac Yard location in Virginia. More than 100 participating merchants were included in Chicago and almost 200 in Los Angeles at launch. (Wonder)
Grubhub is also working with Avride on autonomous food delivery, initially through university catering operations and subsequently from Wonder’s Jersey City location. (Grubhub)
Here we are beginning to see evidence of meaningful volumes rather than demonstrations. At Ohio State University, 125 Avride robots completed almost 235,000 food deliveries during the 2025–26 academic year.
The economics of a university campus cannot simply be transferred to a restaurant, hotel or other hospitality business, but the numbers demonstrate that specialist robots are already capable of performing substantial volumes of real foodservice work.
Wonder is looking upwards too.
Its agreement with Zipline is expected to introduce autonomous drone delivery from selected Wonder locations in Texas from January 2027. Importantly, the infrastructure for its Texas expansion is being developed with future delivery requirements already being considered, including kitchen build-outs, logistics and ordering technology. (Wonder)
None of these decisions in isolation tells us particularly much about the future of foodservice.
Considered together they become more interesting.
Wonder operates the kitchens, owns Infinite Kitchen, owns Grubhub, is integrating robotics into restaurant workflows, is extending autonomous ground delivery and is incorporating autonomous delivery by air into future expansion.
The individual technologies are beginning to look less like separate experiments and more like parts of the same operating model.
This also makes Wonder’s recent employment decisions relevant, although they need to be considered carefully.
The company confirmed this week that it is reducing its workforce by around 7%, affecting approximately 150 roles across several corporate teams, including some within Grubhub.
There is no evidence that AI or robotics have directly replaced those people, and suggesting otherwise would be wrong.
What Wonder has said is that the restructuring allows it to concentrate resources on areas considered important to future growth. Reporting around the decision identifies physical expansion and investment in robotics and automation among those priorities. (Nation’s Restaurant News)
The connection is therefore one of resource allocation, not direct job replacement.
Lore’s stated ambition for kitchen automation is predominantly about productivity: increasing the amount of food that can be produced by the same team. Wonder’s Chief Culinary Officer John Li similarly describes robotics as appropriate for repetitive and physically demanding work, allowing people to spend more time on quality, presentation, flavour and hospitality. (Wonder)
Those are intentions rather than outcomes, and the eventual consequences for employment will be determined by the economics.
If automation allows the same food to be produced with substantially fewer labour hours, operators will clearly consider what that means for staffing. If greater productivity enables businesses to serve more customers, extend opening hours, lower costs or open locations that would otherwise not have been viable, the consequences become considerably less straightforward.
Wonder itself demonstrates some of that complexity. While investing heavily in automation and talking about increasing productivity within individual kitchens, it is simultaneously expanding its physical estate and expects its Texas growth alone to create thousands of jobs as it moves towards more than 100 locations there by the end of 2027. (Wonder)
The outcome is unlikely to be as simple as subtracting one job every time another process becomes automated.
For operators, what matters will ultimately be the return.
How much more food can the same kitchen produce, what does the automation cost, how reliable is it, what labour does it release, how much maintenance is required, what happens when something goes wrong, and how quickly does the investment pay for itself?
Those numbers will tell hospitality far more about the future of robotics than the appearance or sophistication of any individual machine.
This is why Wonder is worth watching.
It is a substantial and rapidly expanding foodservice operator, led by an entrepreneur with considerable experience of using technology to build businesses at scale, acquiring and developing technology intended to change its own operating economics.
The level of capital available to Wonder is far removed from that available to most hospitality businesses, and not everything it attempts will necessarily work.
But it is applying technology in its own kitchens, with its own people, serving its own customers, while increasingly connecting production, ordering and delivery within the same business.
Each new kitchen gives Wonder another opportunity to apply what was learned in the last one.
We will only know over time how valuable those lessons prove to be, but for hospitality and catering they could be far more useful than another prediction about when the robots are coming.
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Hospitality and catering operators can explore emerging service technology at Robot Week in London, with dedicated sessions on 9 and 10 September covering robotics across food and drink service, coffee, cooking, cleaning and back-of-house operations.
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