Dive Brief:
- Wonder purchased a fast casual concept, Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, and is adding two new brands of its own, according to separate announcements issued by the company this week.
- The food hall company, which also owns Grubhub and Blue Apron, will add Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken to one of its New York City locations this year, followed by a broader expansion. At the same time, Wonder is launching two new concepts, Pop Salad and El Diez Mexican Bowls, across 16 locations in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
- Wonder, which has raised more than $1.3 billion across multiple funding rounds since 2024, has pursued a wide-ranging acquisitions strategy of late, and now has over 100 ghost kitchen units with 20 “coming soon,” according to its website.
Dive Insight:
Wonder began its acquisition streak when it bought meal kit company Blue Apron for over $100 million in 2023. It shelled out $650 million for Grubhub in late 2024, then $100 million in cash and $86 million in equity for Sweetgreen’s in-house robotics development company Spyce last fall. The company bought restaurant rewards app Claim in January for an undisclosed sum.
Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken adds a brand in a buzzy and growing segment. Marc Lore, Wonder’s founder and CEO, said Blue Ribbon’s reputation as a fast casual concept with an upscale origin story could make it a strong addition.
“With an incredibly loyal following already in place, we can now scale this iconic brand across the Wonder platform to reach far more people,” Lore said in the press release.
Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken was founded as a chicken-focused spin-off of Blue Ribbon Brasserie, a fine-dining concept that’s part of the broader Blue Ribbon Restaurants, a company led by Eric and Bruce Bromberg.
The chicken segment has expanded dramatically in recent years, in a boom stretching back, arguably, to the 2019 chicken sandwich wars. Concepts like Dave’s Hot Chicken have grown from one-offs or tiny regional players to billion dollar brands, while mid-sized players like Raising Cane’s, Wingstop and Zaxbys, have emerged as genuine national challengers to KFC and Popeyes.
And over the last year major QSR brands, accounting for tens of thousands of locations, added new crispy chicken offerings, potentially pushing the market for fried chicken towards a point of saturation.
In other ways, Wonder’s expansion of its offerings may be swimming against the current.
Pop Salad and El Diez Mexican Bowls seek to leverage popular fast casual menu niches. But the major players in those sectors suffered in 2025 from pullback in core consumer categories. Sweetgreen’s struggles are well known — Wonder may not have snagged Spyce if it weren’t for the salad chain’s mounting losses and sliding sales.
Chipotle, meanwhile, has come under enough consumer pressure to necessitate a multi-part plan to return it to sales growth. Smaller players have struggled too: Salad and Go pulled out of Oklahoma and Texas at the start of this year.
Wonder is also one of the few major ghost kitchen platforms left standing following a yearslong pullback in the segment. And Wonder’s real estate is heavily concentrated in markets that struggled considerably in 2025: high-income, high-cost, high-density cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., and their richer suburbs.
While consumers and markets like this fueled the fast casual boom of the last decade, pressure from inflation and shifts in the broader labor market have weakened demand in these markets, particularly among young, upwardly mobile consumers — as Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright noted in October.
