WONDER EXECS LAY OUT PLAN FOR AUTONOMOUS FOOD PLATFORM Company leaders explain how investments in AI, robots, and drones will help produce and deliver food more cheaply. By Joe Guszkowski A s soon as next year, consumers in Texas will be able to have lunch prepared by a robot and delivered by a drone, with less than a minute of human labor involved along the way.
courier or a drone. Human employees will be responsible for finishing and labeling the robot-produced food before it heads out the door, a job that will take as little as 30 seconds, Hoggett said. Wonder was founded in 2018 by Marc Lore, an ecommerce veteran and billionaire who has helped the company raise more than $3 billion to fuel its ambitious goals. In a wide- ranging interview with NRN Editor-in- Chief Jonathan Maze during the annual restaurant tech conference, Hoggett and Wonder’s head of robotics, Michael Farid, talked about the company’s unique business model and its plans for the future.
That’s the plan for Wonder, the food tech and delivery company that is aiming to develop a fully autonomous system for producing and delivering food. It even wants to use AI to generate customers’ meal plans, based on their tastes and dietary needs, with the goal of feeding them 21 times a week. “We’ll be able to plan for them, cook for them, and deliver without them even thinking about it,” said Wonder CEO Tony Hoggett during an interview at the FSTEC conference. “In five years’ time, we’ll have areas of our businesses that will be very much on that journey.” Elements of this plan are already in place, and Wonder will take another step forward next year outside Dallas, where a Wonder location will be outfitted with the company’s bowl-making robot, the Infinite Makeline, and plugged into a drone delivery network operated by Zipline. Customers in Wonder’s delivery zone will be able to decide whether they want to pick up their food or have it delivered by a human
8 | FSTEC 2026
Photo by Jon Mouer
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