Name: Entrepreneur Marc Lore's Yummy New Start-up: 'Wonder'
Uploaded: 2022-09-27
Duration: 6 min 1 s
Description: Lore's mobile food trucks cook recipes from top chefs and deliver to your doorstep 'piping hot'

Lore's mobile food trucks cook recipes from top chefs and deliver to your doorstep "piping hot"

Entrepreneur Marc Lore's Yummy New Start-up: "Wonder"

Leadership

Mark, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your latest venture. Wonder tell our viewers about this new food delivery service that you just started. Great. Well first off you said, you said food delivery. It certainly resembles food delivery, but we're actually doing is we're created a group of 21 and counting restaurant chains in every cuisine. And these restaurant chains don't exist in the physical sense. They only exist on a mobile platform and this mobile truck will come in front of your house, cook the food and bring it to you to a piping hot. We've got some of the best chefs in the world on the platform, bobby flay, Jose Andreas, nancy, Silverton Marcus Samuelsson, marc Murphy, Jonathan waxman, incredible uh lineup of chefs and this is not like for a party, this is every day, every meal dinner, everything from a high end steakhouse down to burgers and pizza and everything in between. It sounds like a complicated process because you have your wonder chef cooking inside of these mobile trucks and then delivering the food hot to someone's doorstep. There's no open flame. It's a high speed convection oven basically. And all the heavy lifting is done in the central commissary where we sue the steak and we create food kits um and then we bring them onto the truck and then they're fired very quickly so we can turn around an entire meal for your family in 10-15 minutes outside your door. So why is this a good business proposition? It sounds complicated. It's very complicated, but I love complicated business and I think that's where the opportunity lies. I think it's very difficult for others to do. It raised a lot of capital. We invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building, you know, investing the culinary engineering and food science to make this possible. Um, and in the beginning we didn't know if it was possible, could you cook a steak as good as you'd get in a great bobby flay steak house in 10 minutes outside your door and delivered piping hot. And we proved we can how much research, development and money went into four years and hundreds of millions of dollars just in the food engineering and food science aspect of, and we're constantly evolving and learning every day, we're able to cook now four pizzas, uh that look and taste like wood fired pizza in about four minutes. We have a path to get it down under three minutes. So we're constantly trying to find ways to engineer the food so we can cook great food faster with someone who's very, very light training. So, um, I wanted to see for myself, I went in, took a day of training on a particular restaurant, was fred's burgers, cheesesteaks and went out on the road and was able to produce cheese, steaks and burgers and fries and the whole menu after a day of training, I'm curious about how you got interested in all this because you've been the founder of many e commerce companies. Jet dot com that you ultimately sold to walmart diapers dot com that you sold to amazon and you wrote an op ed article recently and you said that of all the ventures that you've been involved in wonder quote has truly inspired me. Why is that? Yeah, I was truly inspired by the mission to bring great food um, to people that don't have access to it from a business standpoint. I was just tired of getting soggy fries and not be able to order like fish or steak or anything from restaurant delivery. And we solved that, I think millennials and gen z, the generation is putting a higher price on convenience. They're willing to pay to get food delivered, but right until, until wonder weren't able to get it hot, really high quality every time. Well right now, wonder is available in the suburbs in new york and New Jersey. And, but you've raised, you said a moment ago, uh, mo more than a billion dollars to expand the business. What do you want? Wonder to be? We're currently next month will be serving 400,000 households and about 75 towns. The big vision is that we become the go to solution anytime anyone wants to eat a meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week. The mission is to make great food more accessible. We believe there's lots of places right now that could have access two great food that don't. Um, and we want to bring our ovens and our kids and our technology to those those areas. What feedback have you been getting from your customers? Great feedback. You know people are surprised by the quality of the food and how hot it is when they get it. So what happens if the economy slows down? What if food inflation prices just to get to be too high for your customers? How will your business be impacted? Yeah I mean it's growing so fast. I mean if its imp it will be a blip we won't really won't really feel it. We're also moving into meal. Kids ready to cook, ready to heat meals and things that are much lower price point. So we'll have every meal occasion covered here in the very near future. So I'm not worried. You know Mark uh so many people dream of starting your own company and they look at your success with awe. Um If you had to pinpoint one thing, what's the secret to your success? This one thing is three letters V. C. P. Vision. Capital people. Those are the three ingredients of success. You have to have a crystal clear vision. You know exactly where you wanna go. Most people, they have a vague idea of the vision but crystal clear exactly what paint a picture for what you want the business to look like. 10 years into the future. Have a capital plan, understand how much money you need to raise to get there and a plan. How many rounds is it gonna take, how much you're gonna raise? How much are you gonna raise the next time? What do you need to prove with each round of financing? So mapping that out early is really important. And then finally P. And V. C. Ps people, you have to have a clear mission a set of values and build a culture that is able to attract the very best people in the world and then once they're in a culture that gets the very best that they've got to give if you've got the best people and they're motivated to give you the best they've got. You've got a clear vision access to capital. That's how the magic happens.