Marc Lore wants an AI superapp to plan all your meals

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MARC LORE: I’m about 90% of my meals are all AI derived. So AI tells me what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That’s based on the health goals and based on the foods I love. It basically tells me, “Okay, well then eat this for breakfast, eat this for lunch, eat this for dinner.” In the future, if I go out to a restaurant for dinner, AI will be able to tell me what to order off the menu because now we have 375,000 menus via Grubhub. So that’s the future.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Marc Lore, billionaire entrepreneur, NBA owner and founder and CEO of Wonder, a food tech startup that offers delivery, takeout and dine-in options from multiple restaurants and chefs. I wanted to talk to Marc about Wonder’s recent purchase of Grubhub, what it says about the future of the food business, and how all of our diets may be changing sooner than we imagine. Marc shares how AI is already transforming his relationship with food and with his health. Plus, he offers a full menu of lessons on what it takes to succeed in business right now. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[AD BREAK]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Marc Lore, founder and CEO of Wonder. Marc, it’s great to have you back on the show.

LORE: Great to be back, Bob. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkMarc Lore’s vision for Wonder

SAFIAN: So since you were last here, Wonder has evolved a lot as a business. I mean, it started with meal delivery aggregating multiple cuisines from well-known chefs and restaurants. Then you added in-person food halls. You acquired meal kit pioneer, Blue Apron, delivery app, Grubhub, most recently media company, Tastemade. How do you describe what Wonder is?

LORE: Well, there’s the bigger vision and we can get into that, but at the core, Wonder is a vertically integrated food delivery platform. So think Grubhub, but we actually own the restaurants. So we both do the delivery, we own the restaurants, and we cook the food. That enables us to have a superior delivery experience. So out of a single 2,800-square-foot kitchen, we can cook 30 different restaurants across 30 different cuisines, so everything from a high-end steakhouse, Bobby Flay Steak, José Andrés, Spanish tapas, burgers, barbecue, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern, Thai, 30 different cuisines with only two pieces of electric cooking equipment. It’s set up more like a micro fulfillment center. All the food is fresh and it’s cooked to order.

SAFIAN: There’s that term ghost kitchen, which is mysterious sounding, but the mystery for me with Wonder is that: how does one kitchen offer hundreds of menu items and operate with as few as two staffers? You’re not reheating frozen food. So are you using different kind of equipment, different kind of processes, all of that?

LORE: Yeah, it’s different equipment, different processes. The proteins are sous vide, so they’re par cooked. They sit in a tank of hot water. Restaurants do something similar, but we do that ahead of time so we’re able to finish a steak in six minutes to perfect temp every time. We’re able to cook a pizza in 90 seconds. We can cook pasta without water. We’ve invented new ways of cooking food where we can replicate the quality, but also do it with a lot less labor. And the benefit for consumers is being able to order from multiple restaurants in a single delivery so you can order from five different restaurants and get it all delivered hot in under 30 minutes.

SAFIAN: When I asked you how you described what Wonder is, I was curious which direction you were going to go in because your history and part of Wonder is sort of the tech side, and there’s been talk about being a superapp, which is kind of a buzzy term these days. So can you square those things for me?

LORE: Yeah. I think, like I was saying before, the Wonder first party business where we own the restaurants and do the delivery, those are physical brick and mortar where you can sit down — 10 or 12 seats, pick up, get delivery. Think of a high-end fast casual looking location with the kitchen in the back, so it’s not ghosting that way. That is sort of like the core business. We’ve got 40 locations open now. We’ll have a hundred locations in about nine months. So that’s sort of the core business.

But as you said, the bigger vision is superapp for mealtime, meaning all the ways in which a consumer might want to consume food. It could be first party through Wonder, it could be from your local restaurant delivered via Grubhub, it could be a meal kit from Blue Apron, it could be groceries, it could be even restaurant reservations, so all the ways in which you eat. The reason why we want to capture all those occasions is because we’re building this AI-based platform wrapper around it that’s going to, in the future, be able to autonomously feed you according to your budget and health goals.

Copy LinkHow AI can select the food you eat

SAFIAN: Autonomously feed you. So I’m not going to decide what it is I want to eat. The AI is going to tell me what I want to eat or what I should eat?

LORE: AI will learn your food preferences better than you do yourself and that you’ll be happy to rely on AI. So personally, now about 90% of my meals are all AI derived. So AI tells me what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That’s the oatmeal that I was explaining to you this morning.

SAFIAN: I should ask you to tell everybody what you had for breakfast this morning. You told me this story before I started recording, and I was compelled by the specificity of it.

LORE: It was steel cut oatmeal with five, not four, not six, five raw walnuts, two tablespoons of flaxseed, two tablespoons of chia seed, a half a banana, and a half a teaspoon of cinnamon.

SAFIAN: It’s your custom recipe. But just because that’s what you had today doesn’t mean that that’s what AI’s going to tell you to have tomorrow.

LORE: No, but I rate it very highly, so AI does know I do like to eat that, so I do get that quite often, but it also—

SAFIAN: It comes back through.

LORE: Yeah, but my LDL cholesterol was high 90 days ago. It’s not anymore, and this was one of the solves was the flax seed and the raw walnuts. And at the same time, I’m still rating it well. So if the banana wasn’t in there, I would give a bad rating and then I would have to pull back on the other stuff.

I basically get my blood work done. I have my Oura ring, my blood glucose monitoring, all the blood results, all the biomarker, all the data gets fed to AI. I set health goals and based on the health goals and based on the foods I love, it basically tells me, “Okay, well then eat this for breakfast, eat this for lunch, eat this for dinner.” In the future, if I go out to a restaurant for dinner, AI will be able to tell me what to order off the menu because now we have 375,000 menus via Grubhub. So that’s the future.

SAFIAN: It’s pretty technocratic though, right? A lot of people take joy in sort of choosing what to eat, or being… I don’t know, trying something different that maybe they didn’t know they liked. It’s a very different vision, or you think eventually we’re going to prefer to be told what to eat?

LORE: I mean, based on my own personal experience, I love it. I can’t imagine having to think about what I want to eat because it knows the ingredients you like and so it comes up with different meals that are new and you’re like, “Wow, I never even thought about eating this,” and then you wind up liking it, so the variety’s there. It remembers every great meal you’ve ever had. So if I rated something 9.5 six months ago, I forgot it two weeks later. AI doesn’t forget. And so these great dishes get rotated. If you leave it up to me, I’m thinking of the same three things, probably what I had yesterday or the day before, and maybe a couple other things. The brain, it’s not good at remembering all the great meals you’ve ever had, but AI doesn’t forget. So think about it not as a computer telling you what to do, but it’s really a better version of yourself. It’s sort of like if you could capture the best of your brain’s abilities to think about food, that’s AI.

SAFIAN: And when you talk to the celebrity chefs that you deal with, José Andrés or Bobby Flay or Marcus Samuelsson, and you tell them this story, are they like, “Oh, that’s great,” or are they like, “Well, wait a minute, that’s what we bring to it”?

LORE: No. I mean, it doesn’t change. Think about it. You could as an artist, as a creative, as a chef, create a bunch of dishes that you hope resonate with people, and then each individual person’s AI is going to have different preferences, and it’s going to prefer certain meals over others. So nothing changes. The creative canvas is still necessary. It’s still valuable. It doesn’t change that at all.

What it does change is having to go to a restaurant and having to spend time, look at the menu, look at everything. I mean, it’s just, boom, there it is, get this. AI knows you better than your partner or better than your best friend. You might have biomarkers that have issues. I had low iodine, I had high mercury. I don’t have to think about it. AI has given me food to help to fix my iodine. I’m not getting tuna because I have high mercury. It’s taking care of all these health issues in the background without having to think about it.

SAFIAN: So it’s like my personal food critic and my personal doctor working together to give me what’s ideal.

LORE: Foods you love that are going to be healthy, and AI is able to… It’s really fascinating because it’s able to fix your health issues but still get good scores. So number one, you have to love the food. Okay. Now, given the foods you love, AI, you have to now make Marc healthy. And so AI does these little things, and I see it trying things that are a little bit more healthy, and I give it a bad rating. It’s like, “Okay, he doesn’t want to… That’s too healthy for him,” right? And so it’s found a really nice happy medium now where I love every meal, and I’ve never been healthier, and I’m not having to think about what I want to eat. I don’t spend any time on it. I sit down. It’s a great meal. I mean, this is the future.

SAFIAN: And the AI that you’re using, is it a custom AI or are you using someone else’s platform? You guys aren’t in the—

LORE: No, this is just off the shelf LLM. So it’s all about the prompt, and it’s about the data that you provide it, but the models are capable, very capable now of doing this. It’ll get better over time, but right now, like I said, I’ve been doing it and I’m amazed.

Copy LinkInside Wonder’s acquisitions of Grubhub, Blue Apron, and Tastemade

SAFIAN: You can tell I’m amazed too. I wanted to ask you about where Wonder is now as a business. The Grubhub purchase for me was like, here’s a business that was bought for over $7 billion a few years ago and you scooped it up for 650 million. Did you feel like this was a deal you couldn’t refuse?

LORE: I mean, we definitely felt like it was a great deal given the assets that we acquired, and the more we learn every day as we dig in, the more valuable we think the company is, even relative to what we thought when we bought it. So we’re very excited about the business and leveraging the synergies between Wonder and Grubhub. We’re going to be adding tens of thousands of Grubhub restaurants onto the Wonder platform as well, so we’ll have one shared delivery backend. Grubhub, Seamless, and Wonder will be front-end delivery platforms with a different demographic, so they’ll each target somebody a little bit different.

SAFIAN: I mean, you haven’t built businesses before through acquisition quite this way. I mean, you’ve done acquisitions before, but why is that different in this case?

LORE: I think we’re just being opportunistic because we do have this superapp strategy of all meal occasions, and I think one of the big missing pieces was certain local restaurants, and it would’ve taken us many, many years to have 375,000 restaurants like Grubhub does. They’ve got a very impressive college business. They’ve got Seamless, some great assets. Blue Apron was also opportunistic. We wanted to get into the meal kit space at some point. It was really just trying to fill in the missing pieces to bring the vision together.

SAFIAN: Well, and you recently bought Tastemade for $90 million, which is a media company. Why is that part of the puzzle?

LORE: Yeah, so that was really about the advertising business and the content creation capabilities. They’ve got over a hundred million social media followers. They’ve got a TV station, so they can really help brand some of our restaurants and some of our platforms. We like the content studio that they’ve got to create content for us, and then also advertising. So we believe advertising on Grubhub, Blue Apron, Wonder could be a really big business and a big part of the strategy going forward, and we didn’t have one. It was nascent and they do, and so we thought it was just great synergies there.

SAFIAN: So it sounds like Tastemade allows you to amplify certain things that you’re planning for Wonder already.

LORE: Yes.

SAFIAN: … but not necessarily about sort of a classic media business.

LORE: No, it’s like just what you said, amplifying its content side, us as an advertising platform, and then also for us to be able to build an ad business, meaning selling ads on Grubhub and Blue Apron and Wonder. So yeah, it’s really about the assets. In all these acquisitions, it’s the assets that are most interesting to us.

SAFIAN: Marc’s business strategy for Wonder and the acquisitions are intriguing, but I can’t get out of my head that he relies on AI to tell him what to eat. I’m not sure I’d really want someone or something to decide my meals for me. But then again, it would be nice to be confident about the health benefits of what I’m eating. We’ll talk more about that plus some nutritious lessons for business leaders after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Wonder’s, Marc Lore talked about his vision for a superapp for mealtime and how he uses AI to pick his meals. Now he talks about tech’s role in making meals more healthy while also driving down the cost of eating. Plus he shares personal lessons about motivation, goal setting, the benefits of pressure and more. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkWhy Marc Lore loves to work

So you’ve been super successful in your career, selling Jet.com to Walmart for over $3 billion. You could take it easy, but instead you work all the time.

LORE: I do.

SAFIAN: I mean, you talk about the sixth gear and working 20 hours a day, and you’ve said that it’s like eating glass every day and trying not to get cut as it’s on the way down.

LORE: I’ve said that.

SAFIAN: Why do you do this, and how do you do it? How do you maintain that sort of sixth gear pace?

LORE: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I feel like I’m in the prime of my career. People say, “Why don’t you just… You made all this money. Why are you doing this?” But I guess like any athlete or sort of like a competitive sport, you’re in the prime of your career, you’ve learned so much, there’s so much more to give back and do. Why stop now? And that’s kind of the stage I’m at. I’m working harder than I ever have.

SAFIAN: Why stop eating that glass?

LORE: I’m working harder than I ever have before, and I have more energy than I’ve had in a long time. So I think part of it is just the health routine of making sure that you’ve got the right amount of sleep and the right nutrition and exercise.

SAFIAN: But not everybody has the motivation to stay at it at that pace.

LORE: Yeah, I’m more motivated now than I ever have been in my life. Literally, this is the most motivated I’ve ever been about any start-up I’ve been involved with in my life. I love what we’re doing at Wonder. I think it has a chance to really have a big impact on the world, positive impact. When you talk about health and wellness and food as medicine and what we’re doing with AI, I mean, imagine a future where the groceries are autonomously just sent to your house, “Make this for breakfast, make this for lunch, make this for dinner.”

Not only are you getting healthy and eating food you love, but you’re saving money because AI will make the most efficient use of your groceries. Still 30% of food in America gets thrown out at groceries. AI knows you had eight carrots, you used one for lunch, three for dinner, there’s four left, let’s use them. Let’s use everything that you’ve bought. So imagine not having to think about ordering groceries, not having to think about what’s for dinner and not have to think about what’s for lunch. You’re saving money. You’re healthier and happier because you’re got more variety. So that’s the future, and that’s why I’m so motivated because I can see it. We have a real shot in helping make this happen.

SAFIAN: Yeah. And for you, that would just give you more time that you could be working, right? Because you love it. I can’t decide whether it’s motivation or compulsion. You just love it.

LORE: I love it. I love it. I absolutely love it.

Copy LinkThe health benefits behind Marc’s vision for Wonder

SAFIAN: But it does sound like this venture means more to you in some ways than the previous ones that you’ve worked on.

LORE: No, it does. It absolutely does because I see the impact it could have on people, on health especially. I think it’s so sad where we are with preventative medicine in this country, and there’s really just no focus on preventative medicine. You just go to your doctor each year and do a couple of things. “Yeah, you’re healthy,” and then I have a friend, that six months later, dies of a heart attack, had no idea the artery was 90% clogged. We have tests now, CT heart scans that could, with AI, look and see your soft plaque and know exactly how much of the artery is clogged. That should be part of a normal… Like we get a colonoscopy, you should have the heart scan, right? There’s full body MRI to see if you have early-stage cancer. I had a good friend die of cancer. He found out randomly and then died months later. That doesn’t seem like the way it should be.

SAFIAN: But that’s not where you’ve decided to put your focus necessarily on the health end. I mean, food as a conduit to the health, but you’re not—

LORE: Yeah, we didn’t get into this, but as part of this Wonder AI platform, it starts with health diagnostics, which includes blood biomarkers, CT heart scan or MRI if we can make that happen for you, and then how to use food as medicine to basically repair damage and improve the biomarkers. So it’s all an integrated system. It’s not just food on its own and it’s not health on its own, and that’s typically the way it is today. There’s health stuff over here and there’s food stuff over here. How do we bring it together and really truly use food as medicine to heal you and see the impact of it through an app? How do you be the CEO of your own health?

SAFIAN: And you said the app would make it cheaper, but if I have to have all this medical testing as part of it, isn’t that more expensive or my insurance would cover that?

LORE: Yeah, I think the insurance would cover as much as we’re able to make it cover for sure. And then we would show you, “Hey, here’s some things that we’d recommend. This is an extra $200 or $400,” or whatever, and it’d be up to the person to decide whether they want that incremental protection. I think it’s worth it. We’re not talking about tens of thousands of dollars here. This is hundreds of dollars. If you’re saving 30% because you’re not wasting food, you can take those dollars and reinvest it in upgrading and eating more healthier food, right?

SAFIAN: Part of the reason I’m asking about prices is everybody is obsessed with prices now in the face of tariffs and whatever. I know you’ve said that Wonder wouldn’t increase prices. This was a little while ago. Is that still your stance on Wonder’s prices now or are you rethinking where you get supplies?

LORE: Yeah, no, it’s not. We’re actually looking just as we speak at reducing some of the prices on some of the stuff. So no, we’re definitely going in the opposite direction. It just means less margin for us.

SAFIAN: So you’re prepared to give up margin to be able to lower prices at the time when other people are raising prices?

LORE: That’s correct, yes.

SAFIAN: That seems counterintuitive.

LORE: Yeah, but let me also say it’s more complicated than that because when we add local restaurants onto the Wonder platform, we’re making money from that, and we’re able to reinvest some of that back in lowering prices.

SAFIAN: But some folks would just take that extra earnings and just put it in their pocket.

LORE: We believe in investing back in the value prop is best for the customer and also best for Wonder in the long term.

Copy LinkWonder’s ambitious goals

SAFIAN: I mean, I know you’ve set out these big public goals, 95 locations by next year, by next year at this time, IPO ready by 2027 with a target valuation of $30 billion. Does putting these goals out in the world add pressure? It might be easier to just grow and announce milestones rather than set targets that maybe you won’t meet.

LORE: Yeah, and it’s true. There’s always a possibility you don’t meet the goals, but I think the probability of hitting the goals goes up because you reverse engineer it and you work backwards and you get the company aligned. Everybody understands, “This is the size of the prize. This is the goal. We’re working backwards from this. This is why we need this amount of capital. This is why we need to do X, Y, and Z in the next three months, six months, 12 months.” So it’s sort of part manifestation of it by putting it out there and then part being able to properly plan for it, because being a $30 billion company in three years, you execute at a different level, you need a different amount of capital than if you were shooting for a $3 billion company. So it doesn’t mean if you don’t hit it, you failed, but we are giving us the highest probability of getting there by putting these goals out there.

SAFIAN: Adding pressure is not a problem for you. You feel like’s a good thing sometimes to have a little extra pressure?

LORE: I do. I do. I mean, I think the only drawback is you look foolish or people will say, “Hey, you failed,” or, “You set a goal and you didn’t hit it.” Okay, fine, I can deal with all that. There’s way more upside than downside. I mean, I think, again, I can’t reinforce the importance of the planning aspect. Why are you guys looking to raise $500 million? It’s like because we’re working backwards from a very big IPO, and in order to get to that level of sales and that level of profit, this is the amount of capital we need. Everything sort of ties together, right?

SAFIAN: So I’m asking everybody I talk to this question, if you have any reactions or lessons around what’s happening out of the White House these days and the rapid changes that seem to be going on in our government oversight and government policies and whether that impacts the way you think about how you run your business and what the role of business and business leaders are.

LORE: I’m probably going to be in that camp of not talking much about it because I don’t like to talk about politics and stuff, but I will say as an entrepreneur, the ability to take risk, change things, that volatility causes you in the worst case scenario to learn a lot. Short term, it could be a disaster. It could blow up. I mean, start-ups, when they blow up, incredible things are learned. When companies pivot, they’re pivoting because something didn’t work and they learned something.

So I think as long as we’re able to as a country move quickly, try things, learn from the failure, adjust and get better, that’s kind of a healthy way to be. It’s more start-up-y, and I think we were getting a little bit big company as a country, and so I like to see that. Of course, don’t necessarily agree with all the ways in which we’re going about it, but if you take the really big zoom out, big picture, it is good to see us taking risks and trying things.

SAFIAN: I appreciate you being willing to address that. This has been great. Thanks for doing it.

LORE: Glad to be here. Appreciate it.

SAFIAN: Every time I talk to Marc, I’m struck by how differently he looks at business, cutting prices when others are raising theirs. It’s a bold move and a statement, just like using AI to pick his meals or working 20 hours a day even though it’s like eating glass. Marc’s assessment of the Trump administration’s multiple changes is in many ways the clearest expression of his business strategy. While he doesn’t agree with specific choices the White House may have made, he embraces the philosophy of, as he puts it, taking risks and trying new things. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.