And the cooks too….

In the previous post I talked about the distorting effect of digitalization on the truck market and transport logistics. BUT let's go on. I would like you to concentrate for a moment on the “Poke”, that is, on the dish I put at the beginning of the article. If you struggle to see it, I copy it below:

Take a good look at this dish. Now try to look at it well with the eye of the person who works with emerging technologies. Tell me what you see. Why do you see it too, right? No? Don't you see what's special about this dish, which is spreading like wildfire?

Good. I tell you. Suspence, suspence….

It can be prepared by a machine.

It is essentially a mixture of ingredients poured into a bowl. There are plenty of automatic machines capable of doing this: it's a simple assembly line where you first pour the rice, then the beans, then the fish, and so on. Even an unsophisticated robot does it for you.

And let's be clear, "poke" is not the only case. Almost all takeaway food is evolving this way now.

If I go to see on my "Lieferando", a service that delivers food to home (I often use it in the office when it rains or I don't want to go out), I find this:

Take a good look at the shape. They are in fact liquid mixtures, or pieces of things poured into the container.

One thing that emerges from all dishes is always the same: they are extremely automated assembly processes. All you need is a container with ingredient A, one for ingredient B, and a robot that assembles them for you. But it's not the only restaurant of its kind.

Again, same format. A robot can safely package everything. And even "Italian" food is adapting to the format:

And of course the Poke at home:

Obviously that sushi can be assembled by machine is obvious:

So much so that you can find it on a scale in supermarkets:

Then you will say: but that is MODERN food, different from what we eat at home.

True, but here's the thing:

All "new" trend or invented food seems to have already been conceived to be prepared by a robot.

And it is precisely the fact of being different from traditional food that makes us think. Traditional food was not meant to be prepared by a machine, so it was much more complex. But the new trend, (ie the stuff that house girls order when they are in high school and decide to stay in the high school park on their lunch break) is like that.

For now, I repeat for now, these are human cooks who cook “new trend” food, often exotic, and then deliver it using Lieferando. Good.

But ALL the food I find (I don't want to fill the post with photographs) is designed to be built by a machine. It is a simple mixture of ingredients at the END of the preparation. It is assembled.

Slowly, this invasion of cheap food for lunch and home delivery will change tastes. Slowly it will become "normal". But what happens when 50.60% of the restaurants serve this food?

Eh, it happens that Lieferando opens an automated factory and cuts out all the restaurants.

This is the point: there is a transformation of food, and therefore of tastes, in progress. But this transformation, when observed by those involved in industrial automation, goes in a clear direction: food prepared by machines.

Once you change tastes, that food will suddenly be halved in price, because they will start making it to you by machine. And the restaurants that live on that food today will close: by economizing on scale, it is not possible to compete on the price for a single restaurant owner.

Of course, I'm not talking about haute cuisine or wedding lunches. But that's what the average employee eats today who doesn't bring food from home. That's what young people eat.

I don't know how many years will pass for this digitalization of catering, but when it does, restaurants will laugh.

Obviously the starry ones and the quality ones will survive, but for everyone else… the transformation is lurking.

Of course, as usual I will be told that "this will happen in 20 years", because in Italy the future is always "in 20 years" and we do not realize that it is already here. But ultimately, digitization will affect ALL sectors, you just like to think it will happen in 20 years.

But you can already see the prodromes: the product is transformed to be made by machines.

Then, the machines will.