At FSTEC, company leaders explained how they plan to use AI, robots, and drones to help produce and deliver food more cheaply.

As 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.

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 on Friday. “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 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 Restaurant Business 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.

Currently, Wonder consists of about 160 brick-and-mortar locations along the East Coast. Each one offers up to 30 different restaurants, all of them developed, licensed, or acquired by Wonder. Customers can order from these brands through the Wonder app, which allows them to mix and match items from across the entire catalog, or through third-party delivery apps DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub, which Wonder owns. The idea is to offer something for everyone, especially families and groups that can’t agree on what to order.

The company also owns Blue Apron meal kits, which it sells alongside its restaurant food. It categorizes the two segments as “food for later” and “food for now.” Hoggett said Wonder could eventually sell groceries as well.

Wonder’s food is still largely prepared and delivered by humans. But it is rapidly introducing more automation into the process. The Infinite Makeline, developed by a company formerly known as Spyce and acquired earlier this year from Sweetgreen, can now produce bowl-based meals from several of Wonder’s restaurant concepts. It went live earlier this month in a Wonder location in Manhattan.

Wonder is also using robotic arms to sort orders before they are bagged, and it is developing other bots to help manage its massive library of 700 menu items and 1,000 SKUs. The Infinite Mise robot will pick ingredients off shelves and bring them to the prep area, and Infinite Sauce will be able to make an array of sauces for different menu items.

An AI-powered kitchen display system, meanwhile, helps orchestrate incoming orders from Wonder’s many restaurants so that employees know what they should be doing and when. The goal is to have all of the items from each order ready to go at precisely the same time, which can be “quite a complex puzzle,” Hoggett said.

Wonder won’t be able to automate everything immediately, said Farid, who co-founded Spyce and joined Wonder with the acquisition. Tasks like cooking and assembling burgers, for instance, will still be done mostly by humans in the near-term.

“Maybe one day, we’ll address those,” he said. “But we’re starting with the core challenge of true authentic variety, which is handling hundreds, thousands of SKUs.”

Of course, the company hopes that automation will also bring down its operating costs, including labor costs, allowing it to pass those savings on to customers in the form of lower prices. But Hoggett declined to share details about Wonder’s labor cost percentage or its unit economics.

“What I can tell you is that across 30 restaurants, because of the way we built both the hardware, with robotics and automation, but just as importantly, the software through our sequencing algorithm, it allows a multi-skilled workforce to cook whatever is in front of them, super accurately, and importantly, to your question, incredibly cheaply,” he said.

Wonder hopes automated delivery vehicles like drones will help lower costs further, while also speeding up deliveries and expanding Wonder’s radius. You don’t have to tip a drone, Hoggett said. And because they can travel at up to 70 miles per hour directly to their destination, they could double the number of households a Wonder location can serve.

Doing all of this will not be cheap. Hoggett acknowledged that building a Wonder is “a bit more expensive” than a standard 3,500-square-foot restaurant, mainly due to all of the automation.

But, he said, because Wonder is putting 30 restaurants under that roof instead of one, the unit economics are different.

“We know in the way that we’re growing those locations, they’re comping year on year, is that you can take that bet on the capital that we put down, because we are growing into it very quickly,” Hoggett said. “And we have an appetite for risk and betting on ourselves.”

Source https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/wonder-details-its-plans-autonomous-food-platform