Wonder, a billion-dollar restaurant idea, plans 10 food halls and delivery hubs in the Philly area. Here’s where they will be.

Wonder, the billion-dollar “food hall” and delivery kitchen that its founder is poising as “the Amazon of food and beverage,” is preparing to blanket the Philadelphia region.

At least 10 locations from West Chester to Mount Laurel are expected to open in the coming months, the company told The Inquirer. The first round will be in Northeast Philadelphia, Ardmore, Fishtown, and King of Prussia. One of those is expected in April, with others following beginning in May.

Wonder, now with 38 dine-in and delivery locations mainly in the New York City area, is fueled by $1.5 billion in investment — allowing it to buy delivery giant GrubHub for $650 million — and buy-ins from such popular chefs as Bobby Flay, José Andrés, and Marcus Samuelsson. By the end of the year, the company plans to have 90 locations throughout the Northeast.

Speed and efficiency are its focus. “We have a metric internally that we call ‘order to eat,’” said Daniel Shlossman, Wonder’s chief growth and marketing officer. “We target for every meal to be [delivered in] under 30 minutes from when you press ‘order’ to when it is in your hands on the doorstep,” he said. This is achieved by keeping delivery areas tight — within six minutes in a city and 10 to 12 minutes in the suburbs, he said.

Menu offerings are vast. Wonder creates its own brands (Wing Trip, Burger Baby, Limesalt). It also partners with chefs who create Wonder-specific brands, such as Walnut Lane by Jonathan Waxman, and re-creates dishes from celebrated restaurants such as Fred’s Meat & Bread (Atlanta), Streetbird by Marcus Samuelsson (New York), and Tejas Barbecue (Tomball, Texas).

Talk in the industry is that Wonder has spent $60 million on partnerships with the chefs, who work with Wonder’s “culinary engineering” team to replicate their recipes. “We have essentially been able to have the end product be the same as approved by [the chefs],” said Shlossman, who said partnerships with Philadelphia-area chefs are being considered.

Wonder has partnered with local food bank Philabundance on initiatives including a “round-up” function in the app for contributions, Shlossman said.

One of Wonder’s selling points is being able to order from what it calls multiple restaurants in a single order — “that is, when you’re having a meal with the family and you want the steak and someone else wants a poke bowl and the kids want mac and cheese and chicken tenders,” Shlossman said.

This concept is not new. As delivery exploded five years ago during the pandemic, many fast-casual restaurants were sending food from multiple concepts and menus out of one kitchen. Top Tomato, in Washington Square West, for example, marketed food under six brand names, such as Outlaw Burger, Grilled Cheese Society, and Firebelly Wings. Warehouses in North and West Philadelphia were converted into hotel-like ghost kitchens, each space individually owned and tied into delivery services.

“We don’t like [the term] ghost kitchen,” Shlossman said. The differences are that Wonder offers dine-in with kiosk ordering and micromanages the entire experience, from recipe creation and sourcing to cooking and delivery.

It’s not yet clear how many restaurant brands will be offered from each Philadelphia-area location. “The beauty of our model is that we have 30 restaurants that we can potentially put into a location,” Shlossman said. “If one isn’t performing, we can swap another one in there within a matter of days.”

Reviews on Yelp and Google have been generally positive. Last spring, Eater critic Robert Sietsema gave his dine-in experience mixed marks, as did New York Magazine’s Matthew Schneier, who ordered delivery last fall. Schneier also posited that while Wonder gives far-flung restaurants a chance to expand their footprints, “it’s hard not to think about the real, individual places that won’t ever open at all as a better-funded emporium competitor hoovers up available retail space.”

Asked if that might be a factor in the Philadelphia area, Shlossman pointed to Wonder’s “one-of-its-kind, multi-restaurant ordering feature,” adding: “We think Wonder will be a great fit alongside everything else Philly has to offer.”

Wonder is the most recent venture from Marc Lore, the Wharton School dropout who cofounded Diapers.com, which Amazon bought for $500 million, and later created online marketplace Jet.com, which he and partners sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion.

Lore started Wonder 3½ years ago in North Jersey with a fleet of 450 vans outfitted with kitchen equipment and stocked with par-cooked food. Drivers parked outside customers’ homes to finish the dishes and run the order to the front door. (A pizza-delivery service called Muncho tried a similar business model in Philadelphia around the same time.) The company moved to brick-and-mortar stores in and around New York City and, in a test with Walmart, opened one in Quakertown, Pa.

Lore has recruited his top executives from C-suites elsewhere in the food space. Chief operating officer Tony Hoggett was Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide grocery stores. Jason Rusk, who runs store operations, was chief business development officer of Red Robin. Shlossman joined from Sweetgreen, where he was chief marketing officer.

A recent Lore profile in Forbes quoted a source close to Wonder acknowledging that while the company is not yet profitable, it brings in more revenue per unit than Chipotle or Cava.

“This is once in a lifetime,” Lore told the New York Times last year. “This could be the Amazon of food and beverage.”

Wonder does most of the preparation, organization, and “kitting” of dish elements at a central kitchen in Parsippany, N.J., Shlossman said. “There’s actually a shockingly small number of ingredients that are frozen or ever were frozen,” he said.

These prepped elements are sent daily to the individual locations, whose all-electric kitchens are equipped with high-tech TurboChef ovens, hot-water baths, and electric fryers to finish every dish — pizza, brisket, fried chicken, wings, even steak.

A $36 filet mignon from Bobby Flay Steak, for instance, can even be ordered by temperature. “You can actually say, ‘I want it medium-rare,’ and we are setting that up knowing you ordered it for delivery and we’re going to cook it to a certain point, knowing that it might actually cook a little bit more once it’s packaged,” Shlossman said. Wonder has created its own packaging for certain dishes “so that it gets to the customer how they actually ordered it,” he said.

There are no flames or microwave ovens on site, Shlossman said, likening the kitchen work to assembling a meal kit from the likes of Blue Apron — a company that Wonder bought in late 2023.

The step-by-step methods make it easy for a non-chef in a Wonder kitchen to cook that 10-ounce filet mignon. “We have coined this term ‘fast fine,’ where we can get fine dining-type food but do it without having a set of chefs back there,” Shlossman said.

Each Wonder has 20 to 50 or more employees, including front and back of the house. Mobile ordering is performed on the app, while in-person orders are handled on kiosks. There is a worker on the floor of the restaurant to help with orders.

Further leveraging Blue Apron, Wonder allows customers to order meal kits, which a courier will ferry to those in the delivery zone.

Typical delivery and in-person hours are 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., though “we do customize that, maybe by 30 minutes or an hour here or there, depending on urban vs. suburban,” Shlossman said.

The first 10 locations scattered throughout the Philadelphia region include the city (Fishtown, Center City, South Philadelphia, and Northeast Philadelphia), the Pennsylvania suburbs (Ardmore, West Chester, Newtown Square, and King of Prussia), and the New Jersey suburbs (Mount Laurel and Cherry Hill).

Roosevelt Mall, 2327 Cottman Ave., Philadelphia

1600 Chestnut St., Philadelphia

1001 S. Broad St., Philadelphia

23 W. Girard Ave., Philadelphia

17 W. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore

706 E. Market St., West Chester

Ellis Preserve, 3741 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square

Larchmont Centre Plaza, 127 Ark Rd., Mount Laurel

Market Place at Garden State Park, 2050 Route 70, Cherry Hill

There also is a location, still unsigned, near King of Prussia Mall.