Next year, customers outside Dallas will be able to order lunch prepared by a robot and delivered by a drone, with less than a minute of human labor in the entire process. That is the near-term milestone for Wonder, the food tech and delivery company pursuing a fully autonomous system for producing and delivering food — and, eventually, AI-generated meal plans designed to feed customers 21 times a week.

"We'll be able to plan for them, cook for them, and deliver without them even thinking about it," said Wonder CEO Tony Hoggett during an interview at the FSTEC conference on Friday. "In five years' time, we'll have areas of our businesses that will be very much on that journey."

The Texas test builds on infrastructure Wonder already operates. The company will outfit a location outside Dallas with its bowl-making robot, the Infinite Makeline, and connect it to a drone delivery network run by Zipline. Customers in the delivery zone will choose between pickup, a human courier, or a drone. Human employees will finish and label the robot-produced food before it goes out the door — a task that takes as little as 30 seconds, Hoggett said.

Wonder, founded in 2018 by ecommerce billionaire Marc Lore, has raised more than $3 billion to fund its ambitions. The company currently runs about 160 brick-and-mortar locations along the East Coast, each offering up to 30 different restaurant brands that Wonder developed, licensed, or acquired. Customers order through the Wonder app, which allows them to mix and match items across the catalog, or through third-party delivery apps DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub — the latter of which Wonder owns. The model targets families and groups that cannot agree on what to order.

Wonder also owns Blue Apron, selling meal kits alongside restaurant food under the categories "food for later" and "food for now." Hoggett said the company could eventually add groceries.

Humans still prepare and deliver most of Wonder's food today. But automation is moving fast. The Infinite Makeline — developed by a company formerly known as Spice, which Wonder acquired earlier this year from Sweetgreen — can now produce bowl-based meals from several Wonder restaurant concepts. It went live earlier this month in a Manhattan location.

Wonder is also deploying robotic arms to sort orders before bagging, and it is building additional bots to manage a library of 700 menu items and 1,000 SKUs. Infinite Mise will pick ingredients off shelves and bring them to the prep area, and Infinite Sauce will produce an array of sauces for different menu items. An AI-powered kitchen display system orchestrates incoming orders across Wonder's many restaurants so employees know what to do and when. The goal is to have every item in each order ready at precisely the same time, which Hoggett called "quite a complex puzzle."

Full automation remains distant. Michael Farid, Wonder's head of robotics who co-founded Spice and joined Wonder through the acquisition, said tasks like cooking and assembling burgers will stay mostly human in the near term.

"Maybe one day, we'll address those," he said. "But we're starting with the core challenge of true authentic variety, which is handling hundreds, thousands of SKUs."

The economics drive the strategy. Hoggett declined to share Wonder's labor cost percentage or unit economics, but said automation should bring down operating costs and allow the company to pass savings to customers through lower prices.

"What I can tell you is that across 30 restaurants, because of the way we built both the hardware, with robotics and automation, but just as importantly, the software through our sequencing algorithm, it allows a multi-skilled workforce to cook whatever is in front of them, super accurately, and importantly, to your question, incredibly cheaply," he said.

Automated delivery could compound those savings. Drones travel at up to 70 miles per hour directly to their destination, require no tip, and could double the number of households a single Wonder location serves, Hoggett said.

The capital cost is steep. Hoggett acknowledged that building a Wonder is "a bit more expensive" than a standard 3,500-square-foot restaurant, largely because of the automation. But with 30 restaurants under one roof instead of one, the unit economics change.

"We know in the way that we're growing those locations, they're comping year on year, is that you can take that bet on the capital that we put down, because we are growing into it very quickly," Hoggett said. "And we have an appetite for risk and betting on ourselves."

If the Dallas drone-and-robot pilot performs, Wonder will have its first proof point for a model it expects to scale across the fleet within five years.