Among the many nice many issues there are to determine at Marvel is how one can describe to prospects what it’s. The enterprise doesn’t match neatly into an present meals service class. “Supply firm” implies simply an app and courier community, like Uber Eats or Grubhub, however Marvel makes all its personal meals in its personal kitchens, too. “Ghost kitchen” and “digital restaurant” describe manufacturers that exist solely as a menu on an app, with no street-level industrial presence; Marvel has slickly designed places the place prospects can order, choose up, and, not less than in idea, dine in at a handful of tables. These days, the corporate’s inside inventive workforce of seven has coalesced across the tagline “A New Sort of Meals Corridor.”

“I feel that will get to the variability facet,” mentioned Daniel Shlossman, who left a task because the advertising and marketing chief at Sweetgreen to hitch Marvel’s senior management workforce in 2023. But additionally, he mentioned, “we discuss it because the ‘super-app of mealtime,’” an outline that sums up Mr. Lore’s ambition for Marvel’s app to promote and ship not solely meals from its personal kitchens, however meals from different eating places, too, in addition to meal kits, even groceries. (Marvel’s choices usually are not obtainable by way of different supply apps, which suggests prospects must need its meals sufficient to hunt it out.)

At present, although, the principle focus at Marvel is getting its personal eating places up and operating. Its kitchens don’t require gas-powered stoves and exhaust methods to vent cooking fumes, making for cheaper, faster build-outs. Every thing on the Marvel menu is designed to be cooked utilizing three items of electrical tools: a sizzling water bathtub, a rapid-cook oven, and a fryer.

Throughout a go to to Parsippany in January, Mr. Shlossman took me to see Marvel’s analysis and improvement middle, a collection of gleaming check kitchens staffed with dozens {of professional} cooks clad in Marvel-branded chef’s whites.

Marvel prepares and in lots of circumstances, par-cooks, all of its menu gadgets in giant commissary services, then distributes the dishes individually portioned to its eating places, the place workers can end the preparation in a matter of minutes, with little cooking ability required. This enables the eating places to be staffed by what Mr. Lore calls “calmly skilled labor.”