Is this really that infeasible? If we just started somewhere unhealthy, and said In N Out with drone delivery, then the $5/meal isn't that far off from what the current cost is.

If we could eliminate the building, the employees (and all of the overhead that goes along with them), and the expensive location that the buildings are usually in, it seems like the cost of the burger could come down.

That sounds pretty nuts, but I don't think it's completely impossible at scale.

Why not just air-drop a shipment of Soylent directly into my mouth? My smart-watch could vibrate when it's time to look directly upwards with my jaw agape.

Did you read what I wrote? Of course I acknowledge that this is not feasible yet. I'm saying that this is the product that the market is actually waiting for, and that the technology isn't there yet (automated drone delivery). So what we have in the meantime are awkward solutions that only meet a few of these requirements.

I don't think what you wrote will ever be feasible. I am a big fan of the Chipotle model where you get to pick what you want as you order it and it is prepared fresh, but, unlike a buffet, only the staff handle the food, not a jillion grubby customers pawing through it. And that tends to be a bit pricier than fast food.

I can get something to eat at Chipotle for $5 or less. You don't actually have to order an $8 burrito. But, generally speaking, fresh, made to order, etc. is simply not going to happen for $5. Though I do kind of like your idea of drone delivery.

I don't think you're thinking enough outside of the box. There's no reason that your burrito needs to be made individually by a person. See my reply to the other person that replied to the same comment: different distribution models allow much better economies of scale because you can centralized the preparation stage.

From your two comments:

a service that can deliver fresh or at least reasonably high quality food, which is customizable to individual preferences

I'm envisioning a facility tied to an Amazon warehouse or something similar that might be preparing food for >10000 people every day

I really don't see these two things being reconcilable. I eat at eateries very regularly and I become a "regular customer" and people know my name and become familiar with the tweaks I am going to make to my order. Over time, preferences of mine get learned by regular staff.

I don't think AI is anywhere near that point. There are a thousand small things going on that you would have to think to program into the AI and probably wouldn't without deploying and iterating.

You and I have different definitions of high quality then. I am thinking of the kind of food produced at the Googleplex or at a similar facility, except with slightly more choice. I would wager most would view this similarly, since most people (at least nobody I know) aren't gourmands with personal relationships at where they eat. I'm not talking about a premium restaurant experience, more like restaurant takeout a la ubereats but without the prohibitively high cost.

I don't have the money for premium restaurants. I'm quite poor. But I am a gourmand and tend to have personal relationships with people where I eat regularly. Guilty as charged.

So, um, yeah, it sounds like your idea of quality food and mine are not at all on the same page. I think there are ways to get quality food at a reasonable price (I think this because of the aforementioned not wealthy status and years of eating well anyway), but I have serious trouble imagining that a meal-in-a-box delivery service would be it and I have difficulty imagining your idea would be it either.

But thank you for clarifying.

Are you talking about quality food or quality, personalised food? At a pricepoint, I think you could definitely manage the former. I think the latter is less common and is best left to premium services or home cooks more often than not.

My comments in this section of this discussion are basically in response to this:

What there is really a market for is a service that can deliver fresh or at least reasonably high quality food, which is customizable to individual preferences, for a reasonable cost (~$5 or so), on-demand, and in a timely manner.

I don't think drone delivery is the bottleneck for incredibly cheap, yet personalized food that's delivered to you on the order of ~15 minutes. Ingredients, chef's time, kitchen space, etc. are going to eat that five bucks right up.

A six-inch sub from Subway is already nine bucks, and that includes the Sandwich Rembrandt personalizing it for me with an extra slice of provolone for a dollar extra.

The market isn't waiting for it, people are waiting for it - who doesn't want super cheap, super good food, super fast? But there's a saying about picking two.

I'm not thinking of anything like a subway. Having each person's food prepared individually is ridiculously inefficient. I'm envisioning a facility tied to an Amazon warehouse or something similar that might be preparing food for >10000 people every day, not a huge kitchen with hundreds of chefs running around to fill maybe a couple thousand or so individual orders per day. There's no reason the production of something like a sandwich, soup, or really anything else needs to be done by a human.

The problem is that to get the kind of economies of scale that an Amazon-style digital cafeteria could offer, you need to concentrate a lot of equipment in one place (and rent/build a huge place capable of processing large amounts of food coming and going). This is where distribution models fail, because the only place you can build places like this is in suburbs, where you can't efficiently deliver to the well-earning young people in the cities that form your target dmeo.

And I highly disagree with saying that "the market isn't waiting for it, people are waiting for it". People, or rather consumers, are the market. Yes, I agree that basically every would of course want a product that is faster, higher quality, and cheaper. But $5 for one meal really is quite a lot when compared to the cost of food, especially when bought in bulk, and automated delivery/preparation could indeed make this food both faster and higher quality (or rather, give near-professional quality at a much lower cost).

So I'm not trying to pick on you, but have you ever stopped to think about how absolutely dystopic this future you're positing is? And the parts of the community--set aside "consumers" for a second, the point of being human is not to consume, is not to be an economic actor in your model--who could most use price improvements of economies of scale will be frozen out, because they're always frozen out.

We don't need impersonal drones delivering your Food Packages so you don't need to see and interact with human beings and maybe generate some flavor of empathy somewhere inside of you. We need the exact opposite of that.

Personally I don't mind it. I'm not invested whatsoever in involving human contact in getting my food; I don't mind talking to people to get my food or having to interact with a waiter or cashier, but I wouldn't care if I could order on a kiosk or do checkout-by-RFID.

People probably decried the automation of textile manufacturing, that clothing was losing its personal touch. Now we don't seem to have a problem with it. I'm sure food will go a similar route.

Although I do agree that removing the human element in retail/food will be weird at first, I'm sure we'll get used to it. It's more efficient, so I think it's better.

Have you considered the knock-on effects of minimizing human interaction with regard to actually creating an empathic community? That the people who you would like to avoid interacting with (sorry, "don't care" about avoiding, while you implicitly cheer it on) are a part of the local community around you--generally of a lower social class, which emphatically does not make them less important but does make them less visible and thus less considered to you when voting or suggesting policy?

That empathy that develops through knowing and understanding the people around you is what makes society actually work. The idea that "efficient = better" is one of the most profoundly dehumanizing pictures I have ever seen painted of the future and you do nothing to shake that. Monstrosities like the one you posit are what we should be working to avoid because it makes all of us mere grist for the mill.

What do you suggest to do to prevent things from moving this way? Do you think that it will never take off because people are uncomfortable with the idea, or that this is simply not technologically going to happen? I of course would respect anybody's right to vote with their wallets. Just as there are premium goods such as Rolls Royce that are hand-crafted versions of products that are normally mass-produced, I'm sure there will be premium services in the future to replace automated ones, such as food preparation.

The other solution is what is, in my opinion, a sort of neo-Luddite reaciton to automation where we either ban hugely efficient economies-of-scale infrastructures as a make-work program, or a regulation requiring sufficient numbers of humans in the loop.

I think you are really over-interpreting the way I see this. Replacing jobs with more efficient services is pretty unequivocally better in my opinion. If it weren't better, people would keep using the less efficient services that give them some form of empathic pleasure. In particular, I find the allegations of classism a little baseless. I have no problems interacting with those of a lower class, and if they do indeed lose their jobs due to mass automation, I definitely think the government will need to implement programs to retrain them or to provide for their needs a la basic income. But it doesn't make sense to pay someone to do a job that could be done better, especially ones like in food service, just so we can pat ourselves and say that "they at least have a job."

Sorry, dude, you're not getting me. I'm not talking about the jobs. I'm talking about the profound dehumanizing isolation that the future you posit implies.

It's not about jobs. It's about people. It's about not encouraging the shrinking of individuals into tiny-little-boxes where they don't have to interact with people unlike them. Epistemic and social-stratifying closures are pernicious and dangerous to society in ways "inefficiency" never, not once in human history, has been.

I'm with you. Your concept need not be an every day thing too. Get your human experience on restaurant nights, or having friends around to eat.

I'm not necessarily an introvert, but I'd be happy to remove the human element from ordering takeaway, or get it from something other than the phone order and delivery components which I find pretty boring.

But at its logical conclusion, does it risk ending with megacorp/state-mandated food plans delivered to the majority of people?

Freshly made sandwiches? Don't supermarkets sell those?

The UK has shops like Pret A Manger where the selling point is that all the sandwiches are made fresh in the shop every day.

We also have Subway franchises who tweak your sandwich ingredients.

Or independent sandwich shops who do the same thing.

But the cheapest sandwiches are ready made in Tesco or Sainsburys or Coop or Boots or Waitrose or WH Smith's or Marks and Spencer or whatever.

I guess the public transport in UK cities makes distribution easier because you can pick up a sandwich at the station on you way to work.

I think a service with a restricted, simple menu could hit the $6-8 pricepoint for regular pre-orders, and that would be enough to get many people over the line. If you further sold them a larger order giving enough for lunch the next day, you could get more value out of the delivery cost.