He doesn’t just want to make a billion quickly

One of the many things you need to figure out with Wonder is how to describe what it is to customers. The company does not fit neatly into an existing food service category. “Delivery company” only implies an app and courier network, like Uber Eats or Grubhub, but Wonder also makes all its own food in its own kitchens. ‘Ghost kitchen’ and ‘virtual restaurant’ describe brands that exist only as a menu in an app, with no commercial presence at street level; Wonder has sleek locations where customers can order, pick up and, at least in theory, dine at a handful of tables. Lately, the company’s in-house creative team of seven people has united around the slogan ‘A New Kind of Food Hall’.

“I think this hits the variety aspect,” says Daniel Shlossman, who left a marketing chief role at Sweetgreen to join Wonder’s senior leadership team in 2023. But he also said, “we talk about it as the ‘super app of mealtime,’” a description that sums up Mr. Lore’s ambition that Wonder’s app should not only sell and deliver food from its own kitchens, but also food from others restaurants, but also meal packages and even groceries. (Wonder’s offering isn’t available through other delivery apps, meaning customers have to want the food enough to seek it out.)

Nowadays, however, Wonder’s main focus is on getting its own restaurants up and running. The kitchens do not require gas stoves and exhaust systems to remove cooking fumes, which allows for cheaper and faster construction work. Everything on the Wonder menu is designed to be prepared using three electrical appliances: a hot water bath, a pressure cooker and a deep fryer.

During a visit to Parsippany in January, Mr. Shlossman took me to Wonder’s research and development center, a series of gleaming test kitchens staffed with dozens of professional chefs dressed in white Wonder-brand chef clothes.

Wonder prepares and in many cases par-cooks all menu items in large commissaries and then distributes the dishes individually portioned to the restaurants, where employees can complete preparation in minutes, with little cooking skill required. This allows the restaurants to be staffed by what Mr. Lore calls “lightly skilled labor.”