Our friends at New York peek into Wonder, the rapidly-expanding fancy food hall / delivery app that partners with fancy chefs and restaurants to bring their signature dishes to more locations. The back-end is, well, food kits?
Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. (Not for nothing, Wonder acquired the meal-kit service Blue Apron last year.) It’s not heat-and-eat, as Blue Apron is, or even reheated, Wonder’s CMO, Daniel Shlossman, assured me, but it is true that all of the finishing can be done in the restaurants’ all-electric kitchens by non-chef staffs, which are outfitted with quick-cooking ovens, hot-water baths, and electric fryers. There are no flames in Wonder kitchens.
One the one hand: brilliant. On the other: weird!
[Grub Street]
