Marc Lore, the serial entrepreneur behind Diapers.com and Jet.com, is pushing the boundaries of food service automation with his latest venture. His company Wonder has acquired and deployed an “infinite bowl” robotic system capable of producing up to 500 customized burrito bowls, salads, or poke bowls per hour—dwarfing the output of even the most efficient human worker, whom Lore estimates at around 30 to 45 bowls in the same timeframe.
This technology, originally developed by Sweetgreen and now rolling out in Wonder’s vertically integrated kitchens, spins bowls on a turntable as precise amounts of ingredients drop in according to online orders. The result, Lore boasts, is perfection with “no errors.”
Combined with Wonder’s ownership of multiple restaurant brands, GrubHub delivery, and plans for AI-generated concepts, it promises lower prices, extended hours, and service to smaller markets that traditional chains overlook.
Yet behind the impressive numbers lies a deeper question about the trajectory of work, community, and human dignity in an increasingly automated world. While efficiency gains are undeniable, the rapid displacement of entry-level kitchen jobs raises concerns about what kind of society we are building—one where machines handle the labor and humans become increasingly peripheral.
Lore’s vision extends far beyond burrito bowls. Wonder operates 26 brands under one roof, from premium steaks to ethnic fare, all funneled through centralized, automated facilities. Late-night operations require just three human staff members.
An “infinite sauce machine” and upcoming beverage system aim to compound these gains. Lore even envisions “Wonder Create,” where anyone can prompt an AI to launch a branded virtual restaurant for a modest monthly fee, leveraging the same robotic backbone.
Proponents celebrate this as innovation that reduces costs and expands access. Bowls under $10 and high-end steaks at reasonable prices sound appealing in an era of persistent inflation. Serving suburbs and smaller towns without the overhead of multiple brick-and-mortar locations could bring convenience to areas long ignored by big fast-casual players.
But this model also accelerates trends already reshaping the American workforce. Restaurant jobs have traditionally offered entry points for young workers, immigrants, and those building skills. When robots outperform humans by an order of magnitude, what becomes of those opportunities?
The promise of abundance through automation often overlooks the human need for purposeful work and the social fabric sustained by local businesses.
Chipotle and others have experimented with robotics for specific tasks like guacamole preparation, but they’ve approached full automation more cautiously, preserving some human element in assembly. Lore’s approach is bolder, betting that consumers prioritize speed, consistency, and price over the tactile experience of food prepared by fellow humans.
Critics might note that such systems excel at standardized digital orders but may struggle with the variability and creativity that define great food culture. More profoundly, they risk further eroding the relational aspects of dining and service that bind communities.
As Proverbs reminds us, “The hand of the diligent shall bear rule: but the slothful shall be under tribute.”
Automation rewards diligence in engineering and investment, yet societies must steward these tools wisely lest they create new forms of tribute—dependency on distant tech platforms while local human enterprise withers.
Wonder’s push toward an IPO signals confidence in this model scaling nationally. With Lore’s track record of billion-dollar exits, the technology may soon proliferate. The real test will be whether it delivers not just efficiency, but a net benefit to families, workers, and the common good.
In pursuing mastery over creation through invention, we must remember our calling to work as unto the Lord, valuing both innovation and the image-bearers who have long sustained essential trades.
The robotic bowl revolution is here. The question is whether we will shape it to honor human flourishing or allow it to diminish our shared humanity.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.