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To spotlight different perspectives and give an inside look at Wonder, we’re highlighting leaders from across the organization. This month, we sat down with Abe Nasrallah, SVP of Real Estate and Development, to talk about growing Wonder’s footprint at an unprecedented pace, teams that build while scaling, and what it takes to go from zero to 100+ locations in just a few years.

A quick round to get to know Abe:

• Favorite Grubhub and Wonder order: On Wonder, it’s a tie between the Thai fried rice from SriPraPhai and the buffalo wings from WingTrip. On Grubhub, it’s chicken over rice from a local spot near my house in Brooklyn, Halal-N-Out. It’s fantastic.
• Book you’ve read recently that you’d recommend: I just finished 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin; it’s a great book about the lead-up to the Great Depression. I also read a lot of zoning and real estate books. There’s one called Key to the City by Sarah Bronin that dives into zoning laws in the U.S. It’s fascinating if you’re into it, probably boring if you’re not.
• Coffee or tea: Coffee by a mile. Usually a little bit of milk, no sugar, or a latte. I’m pretty simple.
• Favorite way to unwind after a busy week: Pizza night with my family every Friday. My 2 year old loves it.
• Favorite productivity hack: The “save for later” feature on Slack—I use it constantly. Things come in faster than I can respond, so it’s the only way I keep track of everything.
• What does a typical day look like? One consistent thread in my life is balancing what’s urgent with what’s next. A lot of my time is spent removing barriers so sites can open as quickly as possible. Then there’s the forward-looking piece: what are we doing in 2027, 2028, 2029? Most days are about 70% focused on the immediate and 30% on the future.

You spent more than a decade at Papa John’s, working your way up to Senior Director. Can you walk us through that journey and how your responsibilities evolved over time?

I actually started at Papa John’s the day I turned 16. I was answering phones, then making pizzas, then delivering. At 18, I became a shift manager, and a few months later I became a general manager—one of the youngest in the region at the time.

From there, I worked through college managing stores in Chicago, and then moved into multi-unit leadership. Eventually, I was overseeing about 112 Papa John’s locations across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, including operations, marketing, development, and working with franchisees to improve performance. Later, I moved into a senior director role focused heavily on things like pricing strategy, cost structure, and even redesigning store formats to be smaller and more efficient.

I’ve done essentially every job in the business. During COVID, when stores were overwhelmed, I rented a U-Haul and delivered food to locations myself. That mindset, that there’s no job you won’t do, has really stuck with me and shapes how I lead today.

Your career has been spent entirely in the restaurant space. Are there common threads you’ve noticed across the roles you’ve held and companies you’ve been at?

I’ve seen how success really depends on the team you build. If you want to run a great restaurant or build a hundred locations, it comes down to having the right people and putting them in positions to succeed.

Structurally, I believe in flat organizations. I don’t like bureaucracy or the idea that you need permission to talk to someone. Everyone should be willing to jump in and do whatever is needed—whether that’s making pizzas during a snowstorm or supporting a different function. That mindset carries through to how we operate at Wonder.

For those not familiar, can you describe what you do and your team’s key responsibilities?

My team oversees the entire lifecycle of development. That starts with real estate strategy, deciding where we want to go, and then real estate acquisition, actually finding and securing those sites. From there, we handle design, construction, and equipment procurement before we deliver the completed site to the ops team to open. More recently, facilities have become part of our team, so we’re responsible for maintaining our physical locations, distribution centers, and lab builds.

It’s a very broad scope, and everything is interconnected. The simplest way to describe it is: we find the sites, we build them, and then we maintain them.

What’s been the most surprising thing you’ve experienced as you’ve helped to scale Wonder’s real estate footprint?

The most surprising thing has been this team’s ability to scale. We went from a team of two to a large organization, and we’re delivering sites in under eight months from approval to opening. That’s not just fast—it’s unheard of in the industry, nearly half the average time it takes to develop a restaurant.

I remember early on thinking some of the timelines were impossible. And then the team would just… do it. We’ve continued to surprise ourselves over and over again.

When you’re evaluating where to open a new location, what key things are you looking for?

It starts with market selection—deciding where we want to be strategically. Then within that, we look for the best possible real estate: strong co-tenants, easy access, good visibility, and the ability to serve a large number of households. There are also physical requirements like space, power, and layout, but beyond that, there’s an art to it. We always say real estate is about 60% data and 40% art. You have to see it, feel it, and understand how people move through the space.

Texas is a big next chapter for us. What makes that region so compelling?

It’s one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, with massive, dense metro areas like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. It’s also logistically efficient. We can build central infrastructure and serve multiple markets from it. From a customer standpoint, it also aligns really well with our core audience—especially families, where multi-restaurant ordering resonates the most.

Looking at the work the team has done so far, is there a project or moment that really stands out to you as a turning point for development at Wonder?

Hitting 55 sites last year was a huge moment, especially because we were still building the team at the same time. And then opening our 100th location in under three years was just incredible. It really showed what the team is capable of.

If you could have any other job at Wonder for a day, what would it be and why?

I honestly think I have one of the coolest jobs at Wonder… But I’ve always been really interested in performance marketing—understanding how decisions are made around where we invest and how that drives growth. It’d be fun to spend a day in that world.

To spotlight different perspectives and give an inside look at Grubhub, we’re highlighting leaders from across the organization. This month, we sat down with Marnie Kain, VP, Head of Brand & Creative, to hear how she thinks about building brands, driving differentiation in a competitive marketplace, and leading through some of Grubhub’s biggest brand moments—including this year’s campaign for the Big Game and Grubhub’s new customer value proposition.

A quick round to get to know Marnie:

• Favorite Grubhub order: I’m obsessed with a sushi spot called Restaurant Yamaguchi in Port Washington, NY. They’re really good, they offer great deals on Grubhub, and I always order over $50—so now with no fees, it’s even more enticing. My secret is ordering extra rolls for my (very picky) 12-year-old’s lunch the next day.
• Book you’ve read recently that you’d recommend: I love For the Culture by Marcus Collins. It’s a fascinating book about the shared systems of beliefs and values that shape what we buy and how brands can inspire change. It’s also worth noting that Marcus Collins cited Grubhub as his favorite Big Game commercial, which felt pretty great.
• Coffee or tea: Coffee. I’m never without my travel mug. I worked for many years in the coffee category, so I’ve developed a deep appreciation for the power of coffee.
• Favorite way to unwind after a busy week: I watch a ton of TV. I love going down the rabbit hole of streaming series. Right now I’m watching Pluribus.
• Favorite productivity hack: I’ve started using Gemini to help me write better. I always know what I want to say, so it’s great at distilling ideas and making them punchy and framed for my audience. Another “hack” is scheduling focus time with no meetings. Just dedicated time to get work done. The day runs away if you don’t protect that space.

You’ve led brand work for several companies across various industries. What initially drew you to brand marketing, and what brought you to Grubhub?

I’ve always loved the psychology of consumer behavior and connecting that with culture and brands. I spent most of my career on the agency side, working with brands that live in your closet, pantry, or home, including P&G, Smucker’s, Best Buy, Wendy’s, and TJ Maxx. All of these brands are deeply embedded in everyday life.

While I loved the diversity, I eventually missed going deeper under the hood of the business. What drew me to Grubhub was the ability to have a more holistic impact on brand performance—not just advertising, but the business imperatives, product experience, and long-term brand equity. It’s also a category I love. Food and tech sit right at the epicenter of culture.

Grubhub is at this really exciting inflection point where the brand, the product and the business strategy are all converging. The opportunity to build something category-defining has exceeded what I imagined when I first came on board.

Looking back on your career so far, what experience or inflection point most shaped how you think about building brands today?

One of my first major clients was Carnival Cruise Lines. At the time, only seven percent of the U.S. population had ever been on a cruise. The barriers were clear: people thought cruises were boring or not “for them.” Through research, we learned two key things: people would consider cruising if someone they trusted recommended it, and they needed to see what there actually was to do onboard. Those insights fueled a campaign that ran for over a decade and is still alive today.

That experience imprinted on me the power of unlocking consumer truths and overcoming barriers. The best insights are often basic and obvious once you’ve identified them—they make you nod your head and say, “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel.”

Grubhub recently launched a major new consumer value proposition (no fees on orders over $50) with its commercial that aired during the Big Game—arguably the biggest national stage for commercials. How did that idea come together, from the first insight to what we all saw on game day?

It started with another one of those simple but obvious insights: people love the convenience of food delivery, but they really dislike the fees—especially as orders increase in price. It’s ironic because we’re one of the only categories where fees increase as you order more, instead of going down. Fees have ballooned into a category convention that simply isn’t fair to consumers.

We said that if we were going to stand out and make a real statement about our brand—particularly as competitors continue to charge higher fees—we needed to address one of the biggest consumer pain points.

Eliminating delivery and service fees on orders over $50 is a category-defying benefit. For a family ordering once a month, that equates to nearly $700 a year that could instead go toward bigger orders, more frequent orders, or even a bigger tip for the driver. This isn’t a flash-in-the-pan promotion; it’s a sustained value commitment.

And there’s no bigger stage to introduce the category’s most meaningful new benefit than the Big Game. While many brands aim purely to entertain during that moment, we had something substantive to say. The creative execution helped make it unmissable, but the real star of the campaign is the value proposition itself: Grubhub will eat the fees.

Big brand moments like that often look effortless from the outside, but internally they require deep cross-functional collaboration. What did it take to get so many teams aligned around both the value prop and the creative?

One thing that made this campaign especially rewarding was how much we learned from teams outside of marketing. Working closely with product, finance, operations and our merchant network team gave us a much deeper understanding of how the value proposition would land across the entire ecosystem. That cross-disciplinary collaboration didn’t just make the campaign stronger—it made all of us sharper.

From there, alignment required a tremendous amount of repetition and consistency to drive clarity. You can’t underestimate how important it is to continuously educate teams and reinforce what you’re building toward. Optimism and vision were equally critical—keeping teams motivated through an intense, fast-moving process. Strong project management and program management were also essential. When you have many different functions working together, you need structured checkpoints, shared visibility, and disciplined execution. We made sure no question went unasked.

For marketers earlier in their careers, what skills or mindsets will matter most?

• Adaptability: Change is the norm. The stars in this field are not the people who sit at ease–they’re the ones who are always ready to pounce.
• Initiative: Step up, get out of your comfort zone, grab opportunities, and don’t wait to be asked. Take every opportunity to be a leader.
• Hunger: You need to have a fire in your belly. If this work doesn’t excite you, it may not be the right path for you—marketing requires energy, passion, and drive.

What’s the best piece of leadership advice you’ve received?

I collect what my team calls “Marnie “isms.” A few favorites:

• Don’t cry in your soup — What this means: Resilience matters.
• There are no small parts, only small actors — What this means: Every contribution counts, and you should own your impact.
• Focus on the focus — What this means: Do your work exceptionally well. When you do that, everything else follows.

If you could have any other job at Grubhub or Wonder for a day, what would it be and why?

I’d love to spend a day in one of the Wonder restaurants. I worked restaurant jobs growing up, and there’s nothing like the rush of a team working together in the weeds to make the magic happen. Seeing the excitement on those teams’ faces reminds you what this business is all about.