Cafeteria cooks
Official title Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria (SOC 35-2012)
Also called Dietary cook, School cook, Hospital cook, Institutional cook, Food service specialist
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 441,050 US cafeteria cooks, with median pay of $37,450 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 448,260, in May 2024, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 200,000 from 1940, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for cafeteria cooks: Sysco MyTrkr + US Foods Moxe, 2018 to 2024.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 2.8% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 8.6% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.83 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.83. BLS counted 399,940 of these jobs in May 2013 and 441,050 in May 2025 (+10%, a change derived by Future History).
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Cafeteria cooks: jobs and pay since 1940 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2012
Future History. "Cafeteria cooks: jobs and pay since 1940." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2012.
@misc{futurehistory_35_2012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Cafeteria cooks: jobs and pay since 1940}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2012}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
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≈ $36,490 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
September 4, 1885: The Exchange Buffet opens in New York City, widely considered the first American self-service counter restaurant. Patrons pay at the counter and eat standing up. The model is significant not as a restaurant innovation but as a proof of concept for the institutional kitchen: food produced in quantity, portioned uniformly, served without table staff, held at temperature. Within a decade, the same model will be operating in factory canteens, hospital dietary departments, and the first school lunch programs. The cook who produces for the Exchange Buffet is the direct ancestor of the school lunchroom cook.
Childs Restaurants, which had grown from roughly ten New York locations in 1890 to hundreds across the US and Canada by 1920, introduces the tray and tray-line system in 1898: the defining feature of the cafeteria as Americans now understand it. Customers take a tray, move along a line, select items from a hot table, and carry the tray to a table. The Childs model makes the cafeteria format practical for high volumes: the serving line replaces individual orders, the steam table replaces à la minute cooking, and the cook's job becomes producing for the line rather than responding to tickets. This format will define school cafeteria and hospital dietary operations for the next century.
June 4, 1946: President Harry S. Truman signs the National School Lunch Act, creating a permanent federal school lunch program with cash reimbursements to participating schools for qualifying meals. The NSLPA is the single largest demand signal for institutional cooks in American history: every participating school district must now maintain a functional kitchen and employ trained cooks to produce NSLPA-compliant meals. In its first full year (FY1947), the NSLP serves approximately 7.1 million children. By 1970, it serves over 22 million. By the 2023-2024 school year, it reaches nearly 29.4 million, with 21.1 million receiving free or reduced-price lunches. Every one of those meals is produced by a cook in a school kitchen.
Aramark (originally ARA Services) is founded in 1959 as a vending machine company by Davre and Henry Davidson, evolving from Davidson Brothers (founded 1936 in Southern California). Within a decade it expands aggressively into institutional foodservice management: K-12 school districts, universities, hospitals, correctional facilities. By 2025, Aramark employs approximately 278,390 people globally and generates $18.5 billion in annual revenue, ranking 21st on the Fortune 500. For the institutional cook, the Aramark model means working for a corporation with standardized menus, centralized purchasing, and performance metrics, rather than for a school district or hospital that managed its own kitchen.
July 30, 1965: President Johnson signs Medicare and Medicaid into law. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 immediately expand access to hospital care for tens of millions of elderly Americans, driving a sustained build-out of hospital capacity through the late 1960s and 1970s. Every new hospital bed created a corresponding demand for dietary services: patient trays three times a day, therapeutic diets ordered by physicians, cafeteria service for staff. Nursing-home construction accelerates in parallel as Medicaid funds long-term care for the poor and elderly. The Medicare and Medicaid programs are the second great legislative demand signal for institutional cooks, after the 1946 NSLPA.
Rational AG, founded in Bavaria in 1973 by Siegfried Meister, invents the combi-steamer in 1976: an oven combining convection heat, steam, and a combination mode in a single programmable unit. From 1978 onward the company concentrates solely on combi-steamers. The combi-oven becomes the defining tool of the modern institutional kitchen, replacing three to five separate pieces of equipment (convection oven, steamer, braising pan, baking oven) with one programmable unit. An institutional cook can load sheet pans of chicken, program the target internal temperature, and the oven monitors and adjusts automatically. The labor saving is meaningful, monitoring time drops significantly, but the cook who plans the production schedule, preps the ingredients, seasons the food, and manages the serving line is still required. The combi-oven augments; it does not replace.
December 13, 2010: President Obama signs the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of the Let's Move! initiative, the first major overhaul of school meal nutritional standards in over 30 years. The HHFKA mandates minimum servings of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains; caps sodium and fat; limits milk to fat-free or low-fat options. Standards take full effect by 2014. For school institutional cooks, the HHFKA means a return to more complex scratch preparation, more vegetable cookery, more whole-grain production, less reliance on commodity processed foods. It is a skill upgrade for the role. It also produces immediate controversy: a University of Vermont study finds that post-HHFKA food waste increases 56%, and some districts report 10–12% drops in lunch sales as students opt out. The participation decline creates budget pressure that constrains kitchen staffing across many districts through the 2010s.
March 2020: COVID-19 school closures across the US immediately furlough the largest single employer of institutional cooks, public school kitchens, with essentially no notice. The National School Lunch Program normally serves approximately 29–30 million children daily; within two weeks of closure orders, those children have no school meal access. USDA rapidly deploys Pandemic EBT to replace school meal benefits. Many school kitchen workers transition to parking-lot and bus-route grab-and-go meal distribution rather than being fully furloughed. The episode is the starkest demonstration in the occupation's history of how completely the institutional cook's employment is tethered to institutional operation: when the institution closes, the cook's job stops, regardless of the food need outside the cafeteria walls.
By 2022–2023, eight states plus DC have passed legislation making universal free school meals permanent for all students regardless of income: California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont, and West Virginia. Universal free school meals expand the daily meal count beyond the traditional free-and-reduced-price population to include middle-income students who previously brought lunch or paid full price. For institutional cooks in K-12 school kitchens, universal free meal policies are a structural demand floor: more students eating means more meals produced, more cook-hours required. This policy wave, driven partly by the COVID experience of how critical school meals are to low-income families, is the most significant structural change to the school institutional cook labor market since the 1946 NSLPA.
Will AI replace cafeteria cooks? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for cafeteria cooks
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereUse AI-powered food waste tracking tools (such as Winnow VisionAI) to monitor what is being discarded, review weekly waste reports to identify patterns, and adjust production quantities and purchasing to reduce overproduction.
Use AI-powered food waste tracking tools (such as Winnow VisionAI) to monitor what is being discarded, review weekly waste reports to identify patterns, and adjust production quantities and purchasing to reduce overproduction.[3],[4],[5]
Engage actively with the data from waste-tracking systems rather than treating them as passive compliance tools. Salem Health cut food waste 33% in several weeks by holding weekly team meetings over Winnow reports and acting on specific patterns like excess salmon trim. Cooks who drive those outcomes become visible candidates for kitchen management.
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage kitchen inventory by conducting regular stock counts, entering data into foodservice management software, flagging items below par level, and preparing purchase orders or communicating restocking needs to the dietary manager.
Manage kitchen inventory by conducting regular stock counts, entering data into foodservice management software, flagging items below par level, and preparing purchase orders or communicating restocking needs to the dietary manager.[6],[1]
Accuracy in inventory entry is more valuable than speed: the forecasting and ordering software is only as good as the counts that feed it. Cooks who catch discrepancies between stock-on-hand and system records prevent ordering errors that cost far more than the time it takes to verify.
AI is sitting alongside you herePlan daily and weekly production quantities using demand forecasting data from foodservice management software, adjusting batch sizes for expected patient census, student attendance, or corporate headcount before preparing production sheets.
Plan daily and weekly production quantities using demand forecasting data from foodservice management software, adjusting batch sizes for expected patient census, student attendance, or corporate headcount before preparing production sheets.[6],[7]
Learn to interpret and question demand forecast outputs rather than accepting them passively. AI forecasts are only as good as the historical data they train on: a cook who understands why Monday soup always over-runs on school snow-delay days can correct the forecast and save materials costs.
Where cafeteria cooks go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Food Service Managers
- US median pay
- $69,390 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +5.8%
- Dietetic TechniciansNo timeline for this role yet
- First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers
- US median pay
- $44,080 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +5.4%
What each move takes
Food Service Managers
In schools, hospitals, and corporate dining, food service managers are predominantly promoted from within the kitchen. The pivot requires picking up budget management, contract administration, scheduling software, and vendor negotiation: skills often learned incrementally while working as a lead cook or supervisor. A Certified Dietary Manager (CDM) credential is valued in healthcare settings and can be earned while working. Institutions increasingly want managers who understand both the physical kitchen and the data tools (Winnow, Computrition) now managing waste and inventory.
- · Certified Dietary Manager (CDM) credential or Food Protection Manager certificate
- · Budget management: reading cost reports, controlling food and labor cost percentages
- · Foodservice management software: scheduling, ordering, and inventory modules
- · HR basics: hiring, documenting performance, managing a team under institutional HR policy
How has the work of cafeteria cooks changed since 1885?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Institutional-scale coal and gas range + floor-mounted steam kettles (factory canteen and hospital era)
The institutional kitchen of the late nineteenth century was organized around production volume, not culinary craft. The coal or gas range, several burners across a heavy iron frame, provided the heat. Floor-mounted steam kettles, driven by facility steam systems rather than open flame, produced soups, stocks, stews, and hot cereals in quantities that could feed hundreds from a single vessel. The steam kettle was the defining tool of the institutional kitchen: it democratized volume production and required cooks who understood batch yields, temperature management, and the logistics of getting food from kettle to serving line while still hot. The Exchange Buffet (New York, 1885) and later Childs Restaurants (which introduced the tray and tray-line system in 1898) had demonstrated the self-service model; the institutional kitchen adopted that model for captive audiences (hospital patients, factory workers, soldiers, and schoolchildren) who ate where they were.
Horn & Hardart Automat model: steam-table holding + batch replenishment (1902)
Horn & Hardart opened the first American Automat in Philadelphia in 1902: a coin-operated system that dispensed pre-prepared food from glass compartments kept at serving temperature by steam tables. The hidden kitchens that supplied the Automat ran on pure batch production: large volumes of macaroni and cheese, bean soup, pot pie, and baked goods prepared in advance and portioned for display. This model (produce in large batches, hold in steam, dispense uniformly) was identical to what was developing simultaneously in hospital dietary kitchens and factory canteens. At its peak, Horn & Hardart served hundreds of thousands of New York customers daily; it was the largest restaurant chain in the world. The Automat did not use institutional cooks in the 35-2012 sense (it was a retail food operation), but its kitchen organization is the direct ancestor of the school cafeteria and hospital dietary department.
National School Lunch Act + deck ovens + institutional convection ovens (federal program era)
The National School Lunch Act (June 4, 1946) created a permanent, federally funded school lunch program that immediately and structurally formalized employment for school kitchen cooks. The NSLPA provided cash reimbursements to schools for each qualifying meal served; participating schools had to maintain kitchens capable of producing those meals to federal nutritional standards. By FY1947, the NSLP served approximately 7.1 million children; by 1970, it served over 22 million. Each of those meal-service locations employed at least one trained cook. The deck oven (a multi-shelf electric or gas oven capable of baking large quantities simultaneously) and the commercial convection oven (entering institutional kitchens in the 1950s) extended the range of products an institutional cook could produce within the batch-production model (casseroles, baked proteins, rolls) at the volume and cost-per-meal required by federal program economics.
Aramark + Sodexo + Compass Group contract management model: institutional foodservice outsourcing (1959–1980s)
Aramark was founded in 1959 (originally as ARA Services) as a vending machine company that expanded into institutional foodservice management. Sodexo was founded in 1966 in Marseille, France, entering the US market significantly in the 1970s–1980s. Compass Group originated in 1941 as Factory Canteens Ltd., becoming a major US institutional contractor by the 1980s–1990s. Together, these three companies shifted a large fraction of institutional kitchen management from direct employer (school district, hospital, prison) to contracted professional management: the contractor hired the cooks, set the menus, managed the purchasing, and guaranteed the cost-per-meal. For the individual institutional cook, this meant working for a corporation rather than a municipality: different wage scales, different benefit structures, and standardized menu systems across hundreds of accounts. Compass Group alone employs over 580,000 globally (2025); Aramark employs approximately 278,000; Sodexo approximately 426,000.
Rational AG combi-steamer (1973 founding; 1976 combi-oven invention): programmable batch cooking
Rational AG was founded in 1973 in Bavaria by Siegfried Meister. In 1976, the company invented the combi-steamer: an oven that combines convection heat, steam, and a combination mode (simultaneous steam and hot air) in a single programmable unit, capable of roasting, baking, steaming, braising, and grilling. From 1978 onward, Rational concentrated entirely on combi-steamers. The iCombi series became the dominant equipment choice in high-volume institutional kitchens (hospitals, school districts, universities, nursing homes, military mess halls) because it replaced three to five separate pieces of equipment (convection oven, steamer, braising pan, baking oven) with one programmable unit. An institutional cook can load a full hotel pan of chicken breasts, program the desired core temperature, and walk away while the combi-oven monitors internal temperature and adjusts cooking mode automatically. The labor saving is real: tasks that previously required constant attention (monitoring a braising pot, rotating sheet pans) become a set-and-monitor workflow. However, the combi-oven does not replace the cook who plans the production schedule, preps the proteins, seasons the food, and manages the throughput of a multi-item service line.
Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act nutrition standards (2010): scratch cooking resurgence in K-12
President Obama signed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act on December 13, 2010: the first significant update to school meal nutrition requirements in over decades. The HHFKA mandated minimum servings of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains; capped sodium and fat content; and limited milk to fat-free or low-fat options. The standards took full effect by 2014. For institutional cooks in K-12 school kitchens, the HHFKA represented a genuine skills upgrade: producing compliant meals required more fresh and minimally processed ingredients, more varied vegetable preparation, and more scratch cooking relative to the commodity-food-heavy menus of the previous era. Schools that had been running largely heat-and-serve operations had to return to actual cooking. At the same time, the HHFKA was immediately controversial: a University of Vermont study found that the amount of food students threw away increased 56% after implementation; some districts reported 10–12% drops in lunch sales as students opted out. The participation decline created budget pressure that constrained kitchen staffing in many districts.
Effect on the workThe HHFKA increased the skill requirements for school institutional cooks (more scratch preparation, more complex menus) while simultaneously reducing participation revenue in many districts, creating a structural tension between quality and volume that defined the 2010s for the occupation.
Sysco MyTrkr + US Foods Moxe: AI-driven menu costing and inventory (distributor-side automation)
The automation of institutional food service in the 2018–2024 period did not arrive in the kitchen: it arrived in the logistics layer above the cook. Sysco, the largest US food distributor, launched its MyTrkr platform, providing institutional foodservice operators with digital menu management, cost-per-meal tracking, and inventory forecasting. US Foods built its Moxe platform providing similar menu engineering and ordering automation for institutional accounts. These systems use purchasing data to flag cost overruns, identify substitution opportunities when commodity prices spike, and automate reorder triggers. For the institutional cook, the practical effect is that menus arrive more tightly pre-specified (ingredients chosen for cost, yield, and compliance before the cook ever touches them), reducing the planning discretion that head institutional cooks historically exercised. The cooking itself (breaking down protein portions, operating the combi-oven, managing the steam table, ensuring safe holding temperatures) remains manual.
COVID-era grab-and-go meal distribution + post-COVID universal free school meals expansion
COVID-19 school closures in spring 2020 forced a fundamental reorganization of how institutional cooks in K-12 settings delivered food. With dining rooms closed, many school districts converted kitchen staff to grab-and-go meal distribution operations, producing pre-packaged meals distributed from school parking lots or bus routes rather than served in cafeteria lines. USDA deployed Pandemic EBT to replace meals for tens of millions of children normally served by the NSLP. When schools fully reopened in fall 2021, the institutional cook workforce returned, but into an environment being reshaped by a new policy wave: by 2022–2023, eight states plus DC had passed legislation making universal free school meals permanent for all students regardless of income. Universal free meals programs expand the number of children eating school meals daily, requiring more volume production from the same kitchen infrastructure: a structural demand signal that is projected to sustain school institutional cook employment through the 2020s.
Effect on the workUniversal free school meals policies in California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont, and West Virginia (plus DC) create a structural floor under school institutional cook employment by expanding meal counts beyond the traditional free-and-reduced-price population.
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Browse all rolesCooks, Institution and Cafeteria employment and pay by year
View all 30 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | 200,000 | n/a | Est., IPUMS USA Researched context | Report |
| 1946 | 240,000 | n/a | Est., USDA Food and Nutrition Service Researched context | Report |
| 1960 | n/a | $2,900 | Est., Univ. of Missouri Libraries Researched context | Report |
| 1965 | 330,000 | n/a | Est., Wikipedia Researched context | Report |
| 1980 | n/a | $8,500 | Est., Univ. of Missouri Libraries Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | 380,000 | n/a | Est., Compass Group Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 414,100 | n/a | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 406,010 | $18,300 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 401,110 | $18,930 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 393,500 | $19,640 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 375,210 | $20,410 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 372,450 | $21,340 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 370,920 | $22,210 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 383,540 | $22,620 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 387,700 | $22,730 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 396,970 | $22,710 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 395,280 | $22,860 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 399,940 | $23,170 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 402,800 | $23,440 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 404,980 | $23,960 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 409,850 | $24,750 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 404,120 | $25,860 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 400,320 | $26,860 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 402,480 | $27,750 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 387,300 | $28,650 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 392,860 | $29,910 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 417,780 | $32,510 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 435,640 | $35,320 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 448,260 | $36,450 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 441,050 | $37,450 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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