A Serial Entrepreneur’s Second Shot at Disrupting Food Delivery

There’s more than one way to disrupt delivery. A year ago, serial entrepreneur Marc Lore announced that Wonder, his food startup valued at $3.5 billion, was dropping its original business plan. It had been built around van-based kitchens preparing and delivering meals to customers’ doors. Tantalizing as it had sounded, the notion of a food truck bringing dinner to you, rather than the other way round, had proved unworkable — especially in a city like New York, where traffic is dense and curb space scarce.

So, Wonder disposed of the vast fleet of Mercedes Sprinter vans it had acquired for the purpose and pivoted to a bricks-and-mortar model based on a dispersed network of “ghost kitchens.” The gamble was the same, though: Lore was counting on consumers who had become used to eating in during the pandemic to continue to experiment with takeaway and delivery meals.