Wonder, the owner of Grubhub and Blue Apron, is launching Wonder Create on November 17, a new service that lets influencers, entrepreneurs, and brands run their own “restaurant” out of its commercial kitchen locations for $10 a month and keep a share of the revenue.
Creators enter a prompt for a description of the restaurant they want, and the AI generates a name, logo, recipes, and prices, which they can tweak by editing the prompt. From there, Wonder’s kitchen staff and robots cook and deliver the food, so creators don’t need to put up capital, pay overhead, or oversee a kitchen to launch their dream restaurant and post “OMG, so good!” videos about it.
The catch? Every dish has to come from the roughly 700 ingredients Wonder already stocks, and the influencer is just a face on the menu while Wonder controls the kitchen, the staff, and the delivery.
This is quite possibly one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen my fair share of terrible ideas. Where to begin…
- Confusion for consumers. It’s hard enough to navigate truthful restaurant reviews and find hidden gems in your city. Now the restaurant market is about to get flooded with AI slop ghost kitchens that are all just the same pig wearing different lipstick.
- The sterility of restaurant dining. It’s bad enough that most restaurants are already getting all their food from the same supplier, now it’s all going to get cooked by the same chef?
- Been there, done that. This is the restaurant equivalent of an influencer launching their own beauty line, nutrition label, or coffee brand by simply sticking their logo on a white labeler’s product. Let’s not bring that low-effort, be-your-own-boss, slap-your-name-on-it model to restaurant delivery.
- It’s misleading. Now if a diner orders food from MrFeast’s new restaurant, hates it, and says, “I’m never ordering from there again,” they may unwittingly do so from Jim Fartdashian’s ghost kitchen the very next day.
When I think about a list of my favorite restaurants, it includes the BBQ spot that slow cooks its pork for 12 hours, the hole-in-the-wall seafood restaurant that makes the best ceviche and encebollado I’ve ever had, and the Thai restaurant whose owner used to run restaurants in Chiang Mai.
What I don’t think of is Applebee’s, Chili’s, or other casual dining restaurants that reheat the same Sysco appetizers and serve them up in a slightly different front-of-house — effectively the same bland, pretentious, commercialized experience that Wonder is about to bring to delivery at scale.
I hate it. If this takes off, we’re going to need a new law that requires these “influenceraunts” to disclose that they’re merely affiliates of a larger ghost kitchen, with a label like “Cooked by Wonder” or “Don’t Eat Here.”
