Our "Fast-Fine" Future at Wonder

Three years into our operations at Wonder, we’ve made enormous strides toward our vision of becoming the most admired food company in the world. As we aim to be the primary destination for at-home dining, we’ve built an incredible collection of exclusive menus from the world’s best chefs and restaurants, pioneering a new category of dining called “Fast-Fine” and revolutionizing the way people eat.

Through our investments in culinary engineering and food science, we’ve created new at-home dining options that bring unprecedented convenience and elevated food experiences to people’s homes. Which, when we first started out, we didn’t even know would be possible.

It took years of R&D and tens of millions of dollars in capital to get it right, and through the rollout of our mobile restaurants, that investment has given us our unique competitive advantage.

Not every start-up has the good fortune to nail their product-market-fit from the very beginning, but we’ve been able to do just that, with still so much more to do. 

As an entrepreneur, I’ve learned that keeping an open-mind and relentlessly challenging your assumptions is one of the most powerful tools to have at your disposal. You have to be willing to learn, everyday – analyzing past performances, listening to new signals and adjusting quickly to that new information. 

When I took over as CEO of Wonder late last year, I knew there would be new opportunities to pursue, but also tough choices to make.

Our mobile restaurant business has taught us enormously valuable insights, which now, has uncovered an even bigger opportunity for us to scale in a more capital-efficient way. 

For one, we had no idea that we’d be able to cook such great food, in such a small space, in such a short amount of time (with lightly trained labor and minimal food waste). Our original thinking was that the only way to possibly get high-quality food delivered fast to your door, was by bringing the entire kitchen directly to you. But our culinary engineering proved to be so effective – and consumer demand so high – that it opened the possibility to consider other delivery alternatives where we could still provide the same (and in many ways better) customer experience.

We started asking ourselves: 

• Instead of having 30 vehicles serving all of our different cuisines on a given night, could we create a scenario where we serve all 30 of our restaurants from a single, fixed space?
• With that high of an order density, could we still ensure that food would never have to travel more than a few minutes to reach the customer?

As we look to expand into new markets in 2023, we’ve begun to untap a new operational strategy that will help us unlock these opportunities - reducing the number of mobile restaurants we have in-market, and replacing them with physical locations that allow for delivery, pick-up and limited dine-in options. These locations will give us the ability to offer dozens of different cuisines through a single kitchen, utilizing the same technology from our mobile restaurants, all while making our great food even better, faster and hotter, delivered right to your door.

As opposed to a ghost kitchen, our Wonder locations are all vertically-integrated, meaning we control every aspect of the process – from the front-end app and sourcing of food, to the cooking, delivery and every step in between. This high level of integration is what enables us to be hyper-precise with our cook times, timing pick-ups and deliveries down to the exact moment orders are ready, elevating the at-home dining experience in the exact same way our mobile restaurants did.

In February, we’re excited to begin serving New York City customers for the very first time, opening our first Wonder location on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In 2023, our plan is to begin operating up to 10 of these physical locations throughout our current service areas in Union, Essex and Bergen Counties in New Jersey; Westchester County, NY; and other areas throughout the New York City area. 

It’s no easy feat executing this type of operational shift, especially when the current strategy and original concept is working, achieving revenue per vehicle beyond what he had projected years ago. But through our pilot program of this new concept, we couldn’t ignore the even faster order-to-eat times, higher NPS scores and cost-savings (through less overhead and infrastructure). 

By far the most difficult part of this strategic decision is that it will mean having to make tough personnel choices for our employees who operate our mobile restaurant business - people who have made huge contributions to Wonder’s success. I’m so grateful for their efforts and building the foundation for where we are going.

Our world-class team has worked tirelessly to get us to this point, and they’ve proven to be just that. World-class. I couldn’t be prouder of how dedicated our team has been through this process, and I’m more excited than ever for the even brighter future we have ahead.