This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on June 27, 2022.
During the pandemic period, street vending and car-trunk markets drew attention in China as operators looked for ways to attract traffic, offset rent, and create incremental revenue. Large-scale chain operators in that format had not yet clearly emerged, partly because local policy factors remained important.
A comparable model in the U.S. market was Wonder Group: a mobile-restaurant network built around vans or trucks, chef partnerships, and at-home meal preparation.
New York-based Wonder Group had recently completed a $350 million Series B round, about RMB 2.3 billion. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company was valued at $3.5 billion, about RMB 23.4 billion.
The round was led by Bain Capital, with participation from Accel, Alpine Group, Amex Ventures, Forerunner, General Catalyst, GV, NEA, YieldStreet, and others. After the financing, Wonder Group’s total debt and equity financing had reached $900 million, about RMB 6 billion.
Wonder Group’s model was to build a network of mobile restaurant units, using vans or trucks as the operating base. It worked with well-known chefs to create a broad menu portfolio, then cooked the food from the mobile unit and delivered it to the customer’s home.
Since launch, Wonder Group had created 19 mobile-restaurant concepts and served more than 130,000 households. After the Series B, the company planned to expand in New Jersey’s tri-state area, adding 11 more mobile restaurants and increasing its footprint to 30.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Wonder Group intended to include prepared-food products in its future expansion plans.
Wonder Group founder Marc Lore previously founded e-commerce platform Jet.com, which he sold to Walmart in 2016 for $3 billion in cash. He left Walmart in January 2021 and announced at the end of that year that he would become Wonder Group’s CEO.
Lore’s idea came from living alone and relying on ordering food. He contrasted that with his earlier family life, when meals were often cooked at home. His thesis was that high-quality home-style cooking had become a luxury for many households, and that prepared, high-quality family meals could be brought directly to customers.
Lore argued that food ordered through delivery platforms often arrived cold and did not always meet a high-quality standard. Wonder Group’s solution was to prepare ingredients in advance in a central kitchen; after a customer placed an order, a van carrying a professional chef would arrive at the customer’s home and complete the cooking on board.
In a CNBC interview, Lore said Wonder Group could reduce costs by preparing ingredients in advance. By assigning mobile units to defined areas, a van could serve multiple customers in one trip and complete multiple transactions instead of returning empty.
North America already had many ghost-kitchen operators, including companies in delivery-only formats and operators adapting container-style facilities for off-premise production.
Wonder Group’s approach was more aggressive: it combined the delivery kitchen with the vehicle itself. That required vehicle modification, as well as enough order density to support the cost of the mobile restaurant and delivery operation.
Before Wonder Group, a similar mobile food concept backed by SoftBank had already experienced a major failure: Zume Pizza.
Zume Pizza was founded in 2015 by Alex Garden and Julia Collins. In 2016, it raised a $6 million Series A from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and SignalFire.
Its original model combined robotic pizza production with a mobile food-truck delivery system.
In Zume’s central kitchen, robots shaped dough into 14-inch pizza bases, sprayed sauce onto the dough, and another robot placed topped pizzas into ovens after staff added ingredients. After standardized baking, another robot moved the pizza bases onto racks. Staff then loaded pizzas onto large delivery trucks, each of which could carry 28 ovens.
Zume used algorithms to identify dense service areas and direct drivers to those neighborhoods. When orders came in, staff reheated the baked pizzas on the truck and delivered them to customers’ homes.
When the first pizzas were delivered in 2016, some customers said the product was clearly better than lower-end pizza options, while others complained about undercooked dough and limited sauce.
In 2018, Zume raised $375 million, about RMB 2.5 billion, from SoftBank. Garden reportedly wanted to build Zume into the Tesla of food. A former employee said Garden was highly skilled at pitching the business to investors.
But after SoftBank’s investment, problems emerged. In autumn 2018, once SoftBank Vision Fund money arrived, Garden held a celebration called Day Z to mark the company’s momentum. By then, co-founder Julia Collins was no longer at the company, and Garden gave a downbeat speech about the company’s value.
According to one person familiar with the matter, FedEx and UPS both rejected requests to supply trucks to Zume. Garden spent cash to buy a double-decker bus from the UK and named it Martha, a giant pizza truck.
In 2019, Zume engineers spent months developing proprietary batteries and charging stations for Martha, as well as automated systems to monitor whether baked pizzas had cooled to a temperature suitable for delivery. People familiar with the projects said they ultimately made little progress.
Zume’s total revenue in 2019 was less than $1 million. Bloomberg reported that in summer 2019, Zume was burning $10 million per day.
By early 2020, Zume had begun laying off more than half of its staff, shut down its pizza delivery business, and shifted toward food packaging, including takeout boxes and beverage cups.
Zume was part of a broader 2018 SoftBank cycle that also included troubled bets such as OYO and WeWork.
For Zume specifically, the issues included R&D for automated mobile equipment, product-quality challenges from automation, and whether consumer demand could support such a heavy cost structure. Its eventual pivot into packaging suggested that the original model was difficult to sustain.
For Wonder Group, the core question was similar: whether front-end demand could cover the costs of chefs, vehicle equipment, and delivery. Based on Lore’s founding logic, the service looked closer to a premium dining solution for affluent households.
In North America, rent, labor, and delivery costs are high, so many startups have tried to attack those cost lines through automation and new operating models. At the time, few had shown clear success as standalone startup models.
In China, the more practical opportunity appeared to be outsourcing non-core restaurant functions, such as cleaning for foodservice stores. For mission-critical operating functions, large restaurant chains still had strong incentives to develop capabilities in-house.
Note: financing, valuation, expansion, and forward-looking figures are historical as of the original June 27, 2022 article.