Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final assembly required.
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[0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.
Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important things.
Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises there's just one dude in a car that drives around responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who worked there will find something more creative and fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and everybody has skills) are being underutilized.
A fun part of cooking by hand is dealing with the quirks of fresh produce. These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook. One cut is 50g thicker at one end than the other, one parsnip is 10% more dense at the top, this cod retained more salt than yesterday and requires less seasoning, etc.
Of course this kind of cooking is miles from what happens in fast food, but there’s a reason the burger station is the most senior position. Cooking patties properly requires skill to get them crispy, fully cooked, but still juicy. Hot damn I’m hungry now.
There must be, running an open-loop process is rather tricky. If it's like any other process in food manufacturing, there are likely both continuous automated checks of trivially measurable properties and regular (every hour or less) manual lab tests[0].
> These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook.
As I understand their process (from what little I read and watched about it in the past), the keystone of it is minimizing input variance at every stage. They stick to specific varieties of potatoes, they keep bun production centralized, they place specific requirements on slaughterhouses for the meat they then blend into standardized pulp, etc. This makes it possible to constrain variance downstream - e.g. the meat pulp has roughly uniform properties, so it can be shaped and processed in tightly controlled fashion.
At the end come pre-processed food pieces that are then shipped to restaurants for assembly. McDonald's venues don't really cook this food, they put it through the last stage of processing pipeline - heating it in programmable ovens/fryers. Restaurant workers aren't making any cooking decisions. That's how McDonald's ensures its product consistency - there's no place left for a human to screw things up.
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[0] - Industrial food processing plants have labs on-site, which receive samples from the production line on an ongoing basis. This is used to check the batches for contamination / pathogens, verify measurements from automated sensors, and to provide ground-truth data for models used in model predictive controllers, if such are used in the process.
It's time to link to the AMFare video again.[1]
This was done 50 years ago, but wasn't cost-effective.
Country Garden in Beijing has several automated restaurants. They have 6 restaurants on this system now, one of which seats 600 people. So at scale, this is starting to work. Maybe. Looking at the videos, it looks hard to clean. Commercial food processing equipment has a look of "can be blasted with boiling soapy water daily", and not seeing that here.[2]
"Pretty much". heh, there are 6 distinct levels of car automation for a reason.
> it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI
Now try this in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground. I consider Wisconsin wide adoption, do you?
We don’t have to perfect automated driving; we just have to get it better than the average human… and that’s a pretty low bar.
And we don’t even have to automate driving everywhere. Who cares if we can’t automate it for 5%? Can we automate it for 95%? Hell, if we can automate it for 30-40% with a lower accident rate… that’s already a win.
Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI
And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have.
Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product.
But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine.
We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.
Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not?
Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope.
This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.