Marc Lore and the Wonder of IPOs
Wonder acquired meal kit company Blue Apron back in 2023, and acquired food delivery company GrubHub back in 2024.
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Does the market really have the appetite right now for another IPO? And no, we’re not talking about Anthropic.
On Thursday, former Walmart CEO Marc Lore’s Wonder Group — which aims to provide a well-balanced diet of food-tech offerings including ghost kitchens, delivery and meal kits — confidentially filed to go public. There’s plenty for investors to chew on.
Meals on Wheels
Wonder has changed a lot since Lore founded it in 2018. Way back then, customers could hire on-demand private chefs, who would roll up to private residences and prepare meals out of a food truck. The company later abandoned the meals-on-wheels model in favor of a food hall model featuring a diverse menu of various cuisines. Lore has said the company is “vertically integrated,” meaning “we control every aspect of the process — from the front-end app and sourcing of food, to the cooking, delivery and every step in between.” Wonder currently has 170 locations, mostly in the Northeast, with plans to heavily expand into Texas.
The VC world has a taste for the concept. A $650 million Series D round this summer came with a $9 billion valuation; the company has raised $3.2 billion total, according to CrunchBase. It has poured the extra cash into building out a menu of familiar food-tech businesses:
- In 2023, Wonder acquired meal kit company Blue Apron for $103 million, taking private a company that had a nearly $1.9 billion valuation when it IPO’d in 2017. Wonder has swapped Blue Apron’s longtime subscription model for a la carte meals instead.
- In 2024, Wonder acquired GrubHub from then-parent company Just Eat Takeaway.com in a deal that valued the food delivery platform at $650 million, including debt. The European Just Eat Takeaway.com had acquired the brand in a $7.3 billion deal in June 2020, when the pandemic ran hot and food delivery ran hotter.
Prime Timing: The filing comes the exact same day that Amazon ditched GrubHub as its official restaurant delivery partner for Prime members, opting for a new partnership with Uber instead. That means Prime members will be able to order Uber Eats directly inside the Amazon app and won’t have to pay delivery fees on orders of $25 or more.
