A Wonder truck is parked outside a customer’s home. Every Wonder car has a chef who prepares meals before delivering them to the front door.
Source: Wonder
Whether Americans are ordering fast food from a local fast food chain or they want the feeling of dining at a five-star restaurant from the comfort of their living room, Marc Lore wants to redefine eating at home.
The entrepreneur is finally going public about his latest e-commerce venture: A business that’s part food truck, part ghost kitchen combined with a DoorDash and Uber Eat your opponent.
Lore, the former head of e-commerce operations for Walmart in the US, teamed with Scott Hilton, who was previously the chief revenue officer of Walmart’s digital division in the US, to launch Wonder Group, Lore wrote in a statement. Tuesday’s LinkedIn post. Lore is the CEO of Wonder Group, while Hilton is the CEO of Wonder, a division within the parent company that oversees a fleet of trucks with small kitchens inside.
CNBC reported about Lore and Hilton’s involvement with Wonder in May, when the business was operating in stealth mode in the affluent town of Westfield, New Jersey. Since then, the duo has launched a delivery service for local restaurants, called Envoy, which is very similar to platforms like Grubhub and Seamless. The two businesses operate in parallel in the Wonder Group.
“It’s really a one-stop shop for all cooked foods,” Lore in an interview with Zoom said. “And we think there’s a real chance there’s a winner in this market. … You don’t really need another app.”
Next year, Lore and Hilton plan to bring Wonder and Envoy to Westchester County, New York, parts of Connecticut, northern and central New Jersey, as well as parts of New York City. Their ultimate goal is to expand nationally, by targeting densely populated communities. Lore said the company plans to have 1,200 to 1,300 mobile kitchens move the Northeast next year and triple that by 2023. So far, the company has about 60 mobile kitchens in operation.
‘Home dining on request’
Hilton’s vision for Wonder is to give American households access to freshly cooked meals from top chefs around the country.
The idea was that someone living in upstate New York could order the famous cheeseburgers from Atlanta-based Fred’s Meat and Bread. Or someone in New Jersey can order a wood-fired Margherita pizza from Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza, based in Los Angeles. Wonder partnered with select restaurateurs, including Bobby Flay and Jonathan Waxman, for the exclusive rights to recreate their menu items.
“In short, Wonder is a food and technology company,” Hilton said in an interview. “It’s on-demand home dining.”
Wonder also wants customers to receive their food while the pipeline is hot. So it completes the final meal prep inside the vans, which are already equipped with kitchen appliances, when the driver arrives at a destination. Each Wonder van has a trained chef on board and is dedicated to one restaurant only.
Ingredients are prepped and packaged in a large central kitchen before they are distributed to smaller kitchen centers, which are accessed by Wonder’s vehicles throughout the week.
So far, business in markets where Wonder serves food has been largely driven by word of mouth, Hilton said. Wonder’s trucks, which have the company’s logo on the other side, somewhat act as roaming billboards, he said.
Wonder currently works with 17 restaurants serving approximately 17,000 households in New Jersey. As more restaurant options are added to the platform, users are more likely to come back and order dinner from Wonder again, Hilton said. The company is also planning to expand into serving breakfast and lunch. It recently launched a selection of desserts and added cocktails after obtaining a liquor license.
Wonder and Envoy is coming out of stealth mode at a time when many Americans have adjusted to eating meals at home during the pandemic. Some consumers prefer to cook their own meals, while others are turning to takeout and delivery from their favorite restaurants. Experts predict some of these behaviors will continue to persist, even as Covid fears ease.
To be sure, food delivery is a tough business to run and make money in. For example, DoorDash has seen sales skyrocket in recent months but remains unprofitable. Its net loss more than doubled in the three-month period ending September 30. And ride-hailing company Uber has long been losing money on its Eats division.
Envoy, notably, uses its own fleet of vehicles and drivers separate from Wonder.
According to Hilton, Wonder’s advantage over other food delivery platforms is that it only offers door-to-door service in a certain area to make multiple deliveries in a single trip so drivers don’t have to run “empty.” . And since the company prepares food at scale in a central kitchen, that process helps keep food costs lower than in a restaurant, he added.
According to Lore and Hilton, for a Wonder van to break even in the evenings, it needs to make about $100 per hour in revenue.
A page from a Netflix playbook
Lore, who co-founded Jet.com before selling to Walmart, said Wonder’s strategy was like taking a page out of the way. Netflixcontent of the playbook.
“We want to block all the best exclusive content,” he explains. “Every celebrity chef – every restaurant is great – we basically want to lock it up and have it exclusively on Wonder.”
“We know that one day there will be competition, but we will have all the best content locked ahead of time,” says Lore.
Wonder Group recently raised venture capital from investors including NEA, Accel, GV, General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures, Lore said. The company declined to provide total funding figures. However, a person familiar with the financing said it has raised more than $500 million to date.
Since leaving Walmart earlier this year, Lore is now the owner – along with former baseball star Alex Rodriguez – of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. The duo’s joint venture, Vision Capital People, also find another bet on digital commerce. Meanwhile, Lore is working to build a so-called utopia of the future, called Telosa.
But Lore said he’s committed his entire “business” to the Wonder Group.
“I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon. … I just have all these ideas flowing,” Lore says of her time since leaving the big barrel giant. . “[Wonder] really has a chance to change the way we think about food – the way we eat it. “
