EXPOSED
Grilling burgers, cracking eggs, dressing sandwiches and plating six tickets at once in a hot, cramped line is physical work that language AI cannot touch — the automation threat here is fryer and grill robotics plus kiosk-driven menu simplification, not chatbots. But the job has almost no licensure beyond a food handler card, customers aren't paying for a relationship with the cook, and the decisions are speed and doneness calls rather than high-stakes judgment. Chains piloting automated fry stations and conveyor grills are the real pressure, and they hit exactly this SOC code first.
Nearly all of this fall was the 2020 shock. It has been climbing back since.
Median pay $25,150 → $35,880 +14.1% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-5.6% 151,100 → 142,700 on the projections basis
Shrinking, but not obviously because of AI
The BLS projects -5.6% by 2034, but at 47/100 this work is only moderately exposed — not the profile of a job current AI can simply do. Occupations shrink for many reasons, and the score does not point at automation as this one's cause.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~20,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
CookHasherLine CookFood ClerkGrill CookPizza CookPizza MakerBroiler CookGriddle CookGrill PersonHash SlingerBarbecue CookBreakfast CookSnack Bar CookGrill AssociateGrill AttendantGrill Line CookSandwich ArtistChuck Wagon CookShort Order CookGriddle AttendantBreakfast Line CookPrepared Foods ClerkShort Order Fry Cook
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Cracking eggs to order, flipping a burger by feel, scraping the flattop between tickets and rebuilding a BLT when the customer says no mayo are manipulation tasks no software executes — 16 rather than 19 because the narrow, repeated menu items (fries, patties, pancakes on a griddle) are exactly what Miso-style fry arms and conveyor broilers already handle in pilot stores.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Eight hours standing on rubber mats between a 400°F flattop and a fryer, reaching into a low reach-in cooler, working a two-foot-wide aisle during a lunch rush with grease on the floor — an 18 because the space is hot, wet and unpredictable in a way robot cells aren't built for, short of 20 only because the line itself is a fixed, engineered station a manufacturer can design around.
No licence, no signature requirement A county food handler card is a few hours online and a $15 fee, and no statute makes you personally answerable for a plate that goes out wrong — that's why this sits at 3 and not 0: the card is still a legal precondition to being on the line, and the health inspector's citation names the establishment, not you.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs You decide firing order for six tickets, when a chicken breast is done without a thermometer, and whether to re-cook a returned plate — real calls, but they run against a fixed menu, standardized cook times, portion charts and a manager who handles anything past the pass, which caps this at 6.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (16/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (4/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (6/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 13 of this occupation's 47 points (28%).
Embodiment (18/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Cooks, Restaurant EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 57/100, still EXPOSED.
Robotic grill/fry cells (Miso Robotics Flippy, Chipotle's Autocado/Hyphen line) remain confined to high-volume single-item stations; independent diners, food trucks and 24-hour counters with variable menus, cramped non-standard kitchens and no capex keep the full unpredictable-line work human. Embodiment stays near ceiling only if kitchen retrofit cost stays above the labor it replaces — the score is already 18 and cannot rise much.
State adoption of FDA Food Code provisions requiring a Certified Food Protection Manager physically present during all hours of operation (already law in NJ, IL, and several counties) — if that certification attaches to the person on the line rather than a manager on paper, and if allergen-control rules like Illinois' allergen-trained staff mandate expand, a named certificated human becomes required at the cook station.
HACCP-style logged responsibility for temperature and allergen calls at the station, with the cook named on the record for cross-contact decisions in a documented allergen protocol — insurers and franchisors already push this after allergen-death litigation. Ownership of a signed allergen call is a real consequential judgment.
Task-mix shift within the same job: if fryers and clamshell grills automate the timed, single-item tier, what remains is short-order expediting — reading six simultaneous tickets, modifiers and allergy substitutions, improvising off-menu, holding plate timing across a mixed order. That residual is genuinely harder to mechanize than the fry basket.
The limit. Embodiment is already near maximum, so upside is capped: even with full CFPM-presence mandates and allergen accountability, the realistic ceiling is around 55-58/100. The threat vector is capital-intensive robotics plus menu simplification, and neither licensure nor trust premium meaningfully blocks a chain that redesigns the menu around what a machine can cook.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 12,410 | $43,680 +22% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 9,990 | $35,360 -1% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 4,460 | $39,600 +10% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 4,430 | $45,790 +28% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 3,850 | $39,650 +11% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 2,280 | $35,610 -1% |
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 1,940 | $36,460 +2% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 1,830 | $37,300 +4% |
| Corvallis, OR | 50 | $54,020 +51% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 830 | $50,870 +42% |
| Kahului-Wailuku, HI | 110 | $48,140 +34% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 47. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.