Job Check
Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders
Operate or tend cooking equipment, such as steam cooking vats, deep fry cookers, pressure cookers, kettles, and boilers, to prepare food products.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Clean, wash, and sterilize equipment and cooking area, using water hoses, cleaning or sterilizing solutions, or rinses.Mostly human for now
- 02Read work orders, recipes, or formulas to determine cooking times and temperatures, and ingredient specifications.AI could speed this up a lot
- 03Observe gauges, dials, and product characteristics, and adjust controls to maintain appropriate temperature, pressure, and flow of ingredients.Mostly human for now
- 04Measure or weigh ingredients, using scales or measuring containers.Mostly human for now
- 05Tend or operate and control equipment, such as kettles, cookers, vats and tanks, and boilers, to cook ingredients or prepare products for further processing.Mostly human for now
- 06Record production and test data, such as processing steps, temperature and steam readings, cooking time, batches processed, and test results.AI could speed this up a lot
- 07Set temperature, pressure, and time controls, and start conveyers, machines, or pumps.Mostly human for now
- 08Remove cooked material or products from equipment.Mostly human for now
- 09Collect and examine product samples during production to test them for quality, color, content, consistency, viscosity, acidity, or specific gravity.Mostly human for now
- 10Pour, dump, or load prescribed quantities of ingredients or products into cooking equipment, manually or using a hoist.Mostly human for now
Tasks from O*NET® 31.0 (US Department of Labor, CC BY 4.0, changed by us), most important first. “Already use” comes from Anthropic’s data on real work chats with Claude; “could speed up” from task ratings made with GPT-4 in 2023.
Four studies, side by side
None is a forecast of job lossToo little dataNot enough work use was seen to measure. This does not mean the job is safe from AI.Anthropic, 2026
13%of this job’s tasks an AI model could do in half the time, counting tasks that need extra tools as half (rated in 2023).Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, 2023
Above 28% of jobsin how often and how well AI helped with this job’s work in Microsoft Copilot chats (2024 data).Microsoft Research (Tomlinson et al.), 2025
Above 94% of jobsin how much of this job’s physical work robots have been shown to do, from factories to homes (2026).Anthropic, 2026
Your human edge
The main tasks with no real AI use seen and no big speed-up expected. This is where your skill counts most today.
- Clean, wash, and sterilize equipment and cooking area, using water hoses, cleaning or sterilizing solutions, or rinses.
- Observe gauges, dials, and product characteristics, and adjust controls to maintain appropriate temperature, pressure, and flow of ingredients.
- Measure or weigh ingredients, using scales or measuring containers.