Wonder Group’s Plan To Win The Mealtime App Category Depends On Growing A Major Ad Business

The first few months of 2025 have seen a surge of M&A, particularly in the commerce and retail media category. But another deal caught my eye earlier this month, when the food-delivery app and restaurant tech company Wonder acquired Tastemade, a social-based and streaming media startup, for $90 million.

Wonder is itself a physical restaurant operator with 38 locations in the northeast US. It doesn’t craft its own menus but brings limited menus from established chefs in a system built for speed and delivery. It’s a creation of Marc Lore, who previously co-founded ecommerce baby supply seller Quidsi and sold it to Amazon, and then the online convenience store Jet.com, which sold to Walmart.

Wonder has expanded largely by acquisition. The company snapped up Blue Apron for $100 million in November 2023 and Grubhub for $650 million a year later, both deals far below the billions of dollars those company’s stocks had once been worth.

With Tastemade, the Wonder Group (as the portfolio is known) takes on a whole new business of streaming video and studio-style creative production.

It is a new capability, Wonder Chief Growth Officer Daniel Shlossman tells me. But it’s an important step in the company’s plan to become an advertising player that spans online and offline channels.

AdExchanger caught up with Shlossman on Wonder’s plans to build its own advertising revenue pillar, as well as its progression from hyper-local, hyper-targeted DR advertising to brand marketing plays. Which is to say, the fun stuff.

AdExchanger: Tastemade’s studio-style content production and advertising is a big change from Wonder’s portfolio of restaurant operations and app-based meal delivery businesses. Why the step?

DANIEL SHLOSSMAN: Where Tastemade really comes in is that we do believe there’s a lot of opportunity on the content, social production and media capability side.

We see it also as a jump-start toward what I’ll call a 360-degree ads business. Tastemade has this incredible history and ability on both the production and ads sides and has partnered with some of the biggest brands across the food and lifestyle space over the years. Bringing that expertise in-house, while continuing to serve those partners externally, is a great opportunity even for Wonder, even as a regional brick-and-mortar, not just the national brand perspective.

What do you mean by a “360-degree ads business”?

Typically, people would say “retail media networks.” But most of the time you’re dealing with a lot of what I’ll say is digital-heavy media on sites and apps, especially food delivery apps that have done this.

Tastemade sells these incredible combinations of content and production, with ads across streaming and social. Which is also predominantly digital. What’s unique about how we approach this is we also have Blue Apron, Grubhub and Wonder, which all combine brick-and-mortar opportunities with digital.

If a CPG company has a brand campaign produced in conjunction with Tastemade, could that same ingredient or product end up in a Blue Apron box at the same time that this campaign is going? Yes. Can it end up in Grubhub with the brand’s grocery partners? Yes. Could it end up within Wonder brick-and-mortar in some way? We think so.

We’re going to able to be bring the physical and digital together, from that perspective, in a way that hasn’t really been done.

For DTC companies like Instacart or Uber, advertising is often positioned as a necessary component, or concession almost, for the real business to be viable. Is that how you see advertising?

If you look at Walmart, Amazon, other retailers, delivery companies like Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, you could go on and on, advertising is a high-margin profile segment that’s been celebrated by Wall Street and is also really good for enabling investment in other areas of the company. And that’s how we look at it.

If we can generate more profit quickly off the ads segment, it allows us to invest in other areas that might need investment to spur growth. All those companies have recognized that high-margin advertising is a great compliment to a lower-margin delivery business, for instance. In that same vein, we see advertising as an investment in everything else that we’re building.

Might ads on Grubhub someday be served by another platform or DSP?

We have some thought on that. For now, I’ll say everything’s on the table. But we’re starting from what Tastemade already does and what we can tack on to that and enhance.

To go back to the vision of being the “Super App for Mealtime,” there’s the Wonder app, Blue Apron, Grubhub, Seamless and now Tastemade. Is the idea to one day have literally one app?

In a perfect world, sure.

Grubhub and Blue Apron have incredible brands and national presence. Tastemade does as well. Wonder right now is 38 locations, growing to 90 chains this year, all in the northeast. We have to balance those things. But as Wonder gets to be a national and international company, do we see an opportunity to bring those things closer together?

Sure, but it’s not an imminent thing.

Are there new marketing channels you’re excited about?

We’re starting to hit a tipping point now, where we have penetration to be able to do brand awareness. You’ll see us, this year, start to do much more of that, which we think will actually rise tides across everything in Wonder and even have a nice trickle effect on Blue Apron and Grubhub.

We’ve dabbled in everything from online to offline. If you asked me a channel, the answer is probably, “Yes, we tested in it.”

But we’re excited that, as we have more and more of a physical presence, we can do more brand awareness.

There’s the debate about brand vs. performance marketing, but what is brand awareness? Practically speaking, does it mean more video and TV spots or some change in production?

With access to more consumers, we can do broader messaging. We are very deep on the ultra-targeted performance side, plus CRM and retention. That’s since day one. But some of these broader plays and broader channels that maybe you can’t be quite as targeted with, we’re going to be able to get into.

I think it’s important as a marketer to have a North Star performance metric. And for us at Wonder, that is CAC to LTV. So we’ve been able to really drill down on what our customer acquisition cost is in different channels. And since we’re still a young company – our most mature location is two years old – LTV comes down more to modeling and projection.

But based on where those numbers have been, it gives us the confidence to take some budget and put it to the side and say, “Hey, we’re not going to be able to have direct attribution on some of this. But we believe doing billboards, for instance, or podcasts, things like that, are going to ultimately see a nice downstream impact. They’ll help us convert in direct channels and get more top-funnel consideration that we might not see in the platform attribution but we know flows through to acquisition.

Hopefully that explains a little bit of the evolution that we’re going through right now.