DEAL ROOM: Marc Lore’s food-tech machine just acquired one of New York’s most beloved barbecue brands (and for Branded, this one’s personal).
Full disclosure up top: Branded backed Mighty Quinn’s, so please read this knowing I’m a proud investor (and not a neutral observer). When a brand you believed in early finds the right home, you feel the investor’s satisfaction and the fan’s lump in the throat at the same time.
The Mighty Quinn’s story is the kind we don’t get to write often enough. It started under a tent at Smorgasburg in Brooklyn in 2012 with chef and pitmaster Hugh Mangum smoking brisket for the long New York lines, alongside co-founders Micha Magid and Christos Gourmos. Three months after the East Village flagship opened, the New York Times dining section put them on the cover, and critic Pete Wells became, as Micha says, the best friend they never met. That review put the brand on the map.
What followed was the hard part every operator knows in their bones: growth, capital, cost inflation, third-party delivery, tech stacks, a pandemic. But the MQ’s team held strong, scaling to roughly fifteen locations across New York, New Jersey, Florida and Dubai, with flags inside Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden, a real CPG business in sauces and rubs, a Series B led by Bolt Ventures, and a strategic move into Detroit with Slows Bar BQ. Micha’s own line says it best: they “skated to where the puck was going,” stayed off the fads, and stayed honest. That’s why the brand was worth backing (and why it just got bought).
On Thursday afternoon it was announced that Wonder had acquired Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque, folding the NYC-born brand onto its platform. I was grateful for the timing of the announcement with Thursday night being my “writing night” and I was still thinking about what to feature in The Deal Room section.
Wonder framed the logic around its mission of making great food more accessible; Micha framed it from the operator’s seat and that after thirteen years, the ride is about to speed up. Both are true. But the reason this belongs in The Deal Room isn’t the barbecue. It’s the buyer.
Wonder is not a restaurant company that occasionally buys things. It’s an acquisition engine assembling a “super app” for food. Run the tape: Blue Apron in 2023, Grubhub for $650mm, the Spyce robotics team behind the “Infinite Kitchen” out of Sweetgreen for $186mm, food-media company Tastemade for about $90mm, rewards app Claim in January, Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken in February, and now Mighty Quinn’s. Takeout, delivery, meal kits, media, loyalty, owned brands, automation. That’s not a shopping spree, it’s a portfolio, and every piece feeds the same app.
Marc Lore sold Diapers.com to Amazon and Jet.com to Walmart before he ever fired up a smoker. He’s raised north of $1.6bn, is opening roughly two locations a week toward 400 by the end of 2027 and talks openly about 10,000 by 2040 (all while calling himself “the IPO guy now”). The model is what makes the deals make sense: Wonder owns its brands outright, so no royalties and no ceiling on scaling, while the Infinite Kitchen automates the line inside compact kitchens built to drop into suburbs and food deserts alike. When you own the whole stack, a beloved brand isn’t a cost, it’s inventory for a machine already built to run it.
Barbecue is one of the hardest things in our business to franchise and one of the easiest things to love. Hours of wood smoke and unforgiving supply chains have kept the category stubbornly local for a century. Pair a proven, wood-smoked brand carrying thirteen years of equity with Wonder’s automation and delivery rails, and you have a real path to putting legit BBQ where it’s never been. That’s the thesis all in one plate.
For founders and the people who fund them, the read is clean: in 2026, the exit is no longer only a strategic in your category or a private-equity roll-up. Increasingly it’s a platform, a vertically integrated, AI-driven, capital-rich platform, stitching together brands, delivery, media, loyalty and data under one app.
Wonder is the loudest example in food, and it won’t be the last to pull a brand of this quality aboard. The mandate for emerging brands sharpens accordingly: be distinctive enough that a platform wants you, and durable enough to keep your soul once you’re inside.
To Micha, Christos, Hugh, and the entire Mighty Quinn’s team, congratulations, and thank you for letting us be on this journey with you. From a tent in Brooklyn to the Wonder platform is a hell of a ride, and it happened b/c a team held together through every reason it could have come apart. We’ll be watching, cheering, and still standing in line for the brisket.
