Cooks, Fast Food

Prepare and cook food in a fast food restaurant with a limited menu. Duties of these cooks are limited to preparation of a few basic items and normally involve operating large-volume single-purpose cooking equipment.

The occupation "Cooks, Fast Food" has an automation risk of 43.0%, which is closely aligned with its base risk of 43.4%. This means that nearly half of the core tasks involved in fast food cooking could potentially be automated with current or soon-to-emerge technologies. The level of automatable risk is moderate, reflecting both the routine and repetitive nature of some tasks, as well as the continued need for human intervention in others. Automation is increasingly present in the fast food industry, as demonstrated by the deployment of machines for cooking, assembling, and delivering orders. However, total automation faces limits due to the skill and decision-making aspects still required in many kitchen activities. Among the most automatable tasks are those that involve routine processes and minimal creative input. For example, "Order and take delivery of supplies" can be streamlined through inventory management software and automated ordering systems. Similarly, "Cook the exact number of items ordered by each customer, working on several different orders simultaneously," is well-suited for mechanical cooking equipment or robotic arms that repeat fixed sequences. Preparing specialty foods, such as pizzas or sandwiches, according to set recipes, also lends itself to automation due to the standardized and repetitive nature of these activities. Such tasks do not significantly vary and can be efficiently managed by machines, thereby raising their automation potential. Despite these advances, certain tasks remain resistant to automation, acting as bottlenecks. Tasks like "Schedule activities and equipment use with managers, using information about daily menus to help coordinate cooking times" require context-aware judgment and real-time decision-making that machines currently lack. "Mix ingredients, such as pancake or waffle batters," and "Measure ingredients required for specific food items" both demand precision and adaptation to the quality of available ingredients or specific order requirements, which may not be consistently achieved by machines. The bottleneck skill observed in this occupation is originality (2.0%), underscoring the importance of human creativity and adaptability in the fast food kitchen—a quality vital for troubleshooting, improvising, and ensuring food quality, which keeps full automation at bay for now.