- Billionaire ex-Walmart exec Marc Lore is taking the helm of a food delivery company called Wonder.
- Wonder operates mobile kitchens that prepare gourmet meals outside your door.
- Lore has founded two successful companies, Quidsi and Jet.com, which he sold to Amazon and Walmart.
Marc Lore is officially taking the helm of a new venture: gourmet meals prepared right outside your door.
The billionaire ex-Walmart executive announced Tuesday that he's decided to go "all in" on Wonder, a food delivery startup he previously invested in. Lore's title will be founder, chairman, and CEO of Wonder Group, which includes two separate businesses: Wonder, which operates mobile kitchens, and Envoy, a more traditional food delivery company.
"At Wonder, we envision a future where anyone can easily access the world's best food — anytime, anywhere," Lore wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the news. "And while we're focused on providing delicious food at affordable prices in the present, we're equally passionate about creating a future where our food is even more nutritious, and our company even more sustainable."
Wonder is bringing something unusual to the food delivery space with its mobile kitchens. Rather than preparing the food at a restaurant or at ghost kitchens like the startup Reef, Wonder sources its ingredients from a central commissary — the meals are then "fired, finished, and plated in our mobile kitchens just steps away from your door," Lore wrote on LinkedIn.
Lore said that Wonder will offer everything from family-style meals to salads to burgers and steaks, and that it partners with "top chefs" to create proprietary menus.
Wonder began operating in stealth mode in Westfield, New Jersey, earlier this year, and CNBC reports that the company is currently operating 60 mobile kitchens. Starting next year, the company plans to expand to Westchester County, New York, as well as parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York City.
Lore told CNBC that Wonder hopes to have a fleet of up to 1,300 mobile kitchens next year with plans for a national expansion in the future.
CNBC reported in May that Lore and his brother, Chad, were investors in the company called Wonder and that Scott Hilton, another former Walmart executive, was leading as CEO. Hilton will remain Wonder's CEO while Lore will oversee the entire group, according to CNBC.
Lore, who stepped down as the CEO of Walmart's US e-commerce division in January, has been an entrepreneur since as far back as 2005, when he cofounded Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com — he sold the company to Amazon six years later for $500 million. After a short stint at Amazon, Lore founded Jet.com, an e-commerce competitor that he sold to Walmart in 2016 for $3 billion in cash, plus stock.
Since leaving his post at Walmart this year, Lore has also been focused on building a futuristic city known as Telosa, which plans to offer its citizens equal access to education, healthcare, and transportation. The ambitious endeavor — which Lore describes as a combination equality and capitalism, or "equitism" — is expected to cost $25 billion for the first phase, with the total cost surpassing $400 billion.