Wonder Has Raised Over a Billion Dollars to Be a Maker of Generic Food ⇥ grubstreet.com

Matthew Schneier, Grub Street:

What even is Wonder? Founded in 2018, it is, according to its own marketing copy, “a new kind of food hall.” More of a Potemkin food hall, really. Under its green shingle, Wonder comprises some 30 “restaurants,” which are really more like sub-brands. […]

[…] The company partners with chefs or restaurateurs for an up-front fee and equity, and its team of “culinary engineers” works with the chefs for months to develop a scalable, deliverable menu. New ideas are then piloted at a Wonder location — Downtown Brooklyn and Westfield, New Jersey, are both pilot stores — after which the food is rolled out to many more. Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. […]

So it is a bunch of styles of food assembled — not made or cooked — in the same kitchen by the same people. Like on an airplane, famously the best cuisine you are able to get when you are stuck ten kilometres in the sky, and by no other metric.

Rebecca Deczynski, Inc, in March:

Wonder, [Marc] Lore’s New York City-based food delivery startup, which currently has 11 brick-and-mortar locations that serve fast-cooked meals by chefs including Bobby Flay and Michael Symon, has completed a $700-million funding round, the company announced today.

Wonder has raised, according to Deczynski, $1.5 billion. To be clear, neither Flay nor Symon is making your dinner.

I get how this allows a group of people to each get the kind of food they want, all in one order. But we already have restaurants that do that, and they usually suck. If you have ever dined at a place offering sushi, wings, fettuccini Alfredo, and seafood, you already know none of those things will be as good as a cheap and unfussy cuisine-specific neighbourhood joint.

This is an evolution of the ghost kitchen concept. Like those, I can see this sort of thing fragmenting communities as supporting a local restaurant is replaced with this mediocre and inexpensive — for now — venture capital-funded alternative.