The Kitchen Code: How Marc Lore’s Robots are Building the Shopify of Food

Marc Lore is not done changing how you buy things. After selling his past startups to Amazon and Walmart, the veteran entrepreneur is now using AI to rebuild the restaurant industry from the ground up. His latest venture, Wonder, just launched an initiative called Wonder Create. This platform aims to let anyone—from social media influencers to local food fans—design and launch a full restaurant brand in less than a minute.

The idea is to give people a “Shopify front-end with an AI prompt” for food. You simply type in the kind of food you want to sell, and the AI does the heavy lifting. It generates the name, branding, menu descriptions, and even the pricing and health info. Within sixty seconds, you have a virtual restaurant ready to go live across Wonder’s growing network of high-tech kitchens.

Inside the Programmable Kitchen

Wonder currently operates 120 locations, with plans to hit 400 by next year. These are not typical kitchens. Lore calls them “programmable cooking platforms.” Each one is an all-electric hub that can produce twenty-five different types of cuisine at the same time. They use a library of 700 ingredients to cook everything from high-end steaks to simple burgers.

To keep the quality high and the costs low, Wonder is leaning hard into robotics. The company recently bought Spice Robotics, a team that built automated bowl-making machines. Next year, they plan to add an “infinite sauce machine” that can recreate 80% of the sauces found in recipes online. By using robots to handle the repetitive parts of cooking, Wonder aims to increase its output from 7 million meals to 20 million meals a year without adding more staff.

Democratizing the Menu

This technology is not just for big companies. Lore wants to enable “mega-influencers” and “micro-influencers” to monetize their following through their own food brands. Imagine a private trainer launching a line of custom healthy bowls or even a movie studio like Disney creating themed pop-up menus for a new film.

In the past, ghost kitchens failed because they lacked consistency and customer loyalty. Lore believes his automated systems solve this. By controlling the tech and the ingredients in his own kitchens, he ensures that a burger from a virtual brand tastes the same every single time.

Limits and Growth

While the AI is smart, it still has limits. Wonder’s robots cannot yet stretch pizza dough or roll sushi, so the platform focuses on staples like fried chicken, wings, and bowls. Lore has also been busy buying up existing brands like Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken to add to the menu.

With the recent purchase of Grubhub and Blue Apron, Wonder is building a massive ecosystem where AI learns your preferences and handles your meals for you. Lore is betting that in the future, you won’t have to think about what is for dinner. Instead, an AI will suggest the perfect meal, and a robot in a nearby “programmable kitchen” will cook it to perfection.