Andy Shi, New York, NY
I’ve been working as a cook at a ghost kitchen for the Wonder “digital” food hall. It’s an app where you can order food from all kinds of restaurants and cuisines in a single transaction.
They claim to provide meals from “celebrity chefs.” In reality, we serve pre-made frozen meals which are reheated on site using an air or deep fryer. The company hilariously dubs it a “proprietary cooking system.” Each kitchen is no more than a glorified TV-dinner dispensary.
The company boasts about using AI for everything from graphic design to recipe creation to planning delivery routes.
Meanwhile, employees are trained to ignore food-safety regulations and get orders out of the kitchen as quickly as possible. A machine beeps at us if we don’t finish an order within five minutes. Our equipment is always dirty or wet, and preventing cross contamination is virtually impossible in the crammed space.
Wonder CEO Marc Lore is simply following the same tired game plan as every other tech bro: offer a too-good-to-be-true service, hype it up with marketing, cut costs behind the scenes, and hope eventually to monopolize the entire market. Really, it’s just the latest tech start-up gimmick—a self-proclaimed “Amazon of food.”