Wonder has made another acquisition, and this time, it’s a restaurant.
The fast-growing food hall, delivery and meal kit company announced Tuesday that it is buying Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, a one-unit fast casual in New York City.
Blue Ribbon joins Wonder’s collection of more than two dozen restaurant brands, which are available for pickup, delivery and dine-in at its growing network of brick-and-mortar food halls.
Blue Ribbon, which specializes in chicken sandwiches and bone-in chicken, will soon be among those options, starting at one of Wonder’s New York City locations later this year. Wonder will also continue to operate Blue Ribbon’s existing location in Manhattan’s East Village.
The chicken concept was part of Blue Ribbon Restaurants, a respected New York group founded by brothers Eric and Bruce Bromberg that began in 1992 with Blue Ribbon Brasserie. In 2013, the Brombergs spun off the brasserie’s popular fried chicken into its own concept, Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken.
Blue Ribbon is known for bone-in chicken and sandwiches. | Photo courtesy of Wonder
For Wonder, Blue Ribbon gives it a recognizable name to plug into its 100 outlets and counting along the East Coast.
“We don’t have to explain to people, through marketing and otherwise, what makes this brand so great,” said Wonder President Jay Naik in an interview.
Blue Ribbon is Wonder’s third chicken concept, along with Street Bird by Marcus Samuelsson and Mr. D’s Fried Chicken. All three are different, Naik said, and Wonder believes Blue Ribbon will allow it to compete with other fast-casual chicken players like Raising Cane’s and Chick-fil-A.
“The chicken market is humongous. It’s one of the largest,” Naik said. “There’s enough TAM for 30 concepts in chicken to live if we can support it.”
Blue Ribbon is also the first restaurant concept that Wonder has acquired outright, and signals the beginning of a new growth strategy for a company that has already been extremely active on the M&A market. (Blue Ribbon is Wonder’s seventh acquisition and second this year.)
Wonder’s other restaurant brands were either created in-house or are existing brands that licensed their concepts to Wonder.
“When we build our own brands … the investment that it takes for them to become household names is a two, three-year arc, if we’re being generous,” Naik said. “Acquiring a brand just accelerates that.”
It’s on the lookout for single-unit concepts, 10- to 20-unit regional players and even national chains, Naik said. “It’s a crawl, walk, run setup that we have going right now,” he said, “but it’ll happen fast.”
New menus will be integrated into Wonder's cooking process, wherein meals are partially cooked at a central facility and shipped to stores, where they're finished and served. Over the past year, Wonder has expanded its mix of ingredients to allow it to produce a wider variety of foods.
"Now we're capable of acquiring any type of cuisine," Naik said. "It's plug and play for the most part."
M&A will allow Wonder to quickly add familiar names to its roster as it looks to expand its selection to 100 brands or more. It will also give the company more real estate to play with as it aims to reach 400 locations by 2027.
With a 10-unit acquisition, for instance, Wonder might decide to keep some of the locations as-is, but turn others into Wonder food halls or even other brands in its portfolio, depending on what it believes will work best in that location, Naik said.
“We took that portfolio, and we separated it as only we could, because we have so many different brands that we can do, and we best utilize each of those across those 10,” Naik said. “And every single one of those are running on the same tech stack [and] same delivery network.”
These locations would also be made available on the Wonder-owned Grubhub delivery app as well as the Wonder app.
The company also intends to continue growing the brands it buys as stand-alone outlets. There will be more Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken restaurants, for instance—one or two in every major city where Wonder operates.
“Those flagships really are marketing billboards,” Naik said. “That content is now available in many more different places, so [customers] can still touch and feel the brand.”
As for Blue Ribbon’s East Village location, it will continue to operate as usual, but with Wonder’s technology and infrastructure under the hood.
New York-based Wonder is led by Marc Lore, a billionaire entreprenuer who founded the ecommerce sites Diapers.com and Jet.com. The company has raised more than $2 billion to fuel its growth as well as a series of acquisitions, including Grubhub, Blue Apron and the robotics company Spyce.
Wonder's plan to start buying more restaurants may give operators some pause. If Wonder owns restaurants and a major delivery app, what’s to stop it from promoting its concepts over others?
Naik said that is not part of Wonder’s strategy.
“Just for the health of the business, we want as much volume as possible, as many people eating as possible, especially through these hypergrowth periods,” he said. “So that’s not part of the strategy of, let’s own the content so we can weaponize it.”
Instead, Wonder’s brands, including Blue Ribbon, will compete on their merits against the rest of the marketplace.
“If it’s the best experience, the best food, the best service, the best value, then it’ll win,” he said. “If it’s not, then we’ve got some work to do.”
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