Voices of Wonder: Abe Nasrallah, SVP, Real Estate and Development, on Wonder’s Rapid Expansion and What It Takes to Build at scale

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.