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Food preparation workers

Also called Food prep worker, Prep cook, Kitchen prep, Deli clerk, Food service worker

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 893,600 US food preparation workers, with median pay of $35,320 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 904,330, in May 2022, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 300,000 from 1946, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for food preparation workers: Chowbotics "Sally" robot salad assembly, 2014 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 3% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 4.6% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.87 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 0.87. BLS counted 824,080 of these jobs in May 2013 and 893,600 in May 2025 (+8%, 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
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Food preparation workers: jobs and pay since 1946 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2021

Chicago

Future History. "Food preparation workers: jobs and pay since 1946." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2021.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_35_2021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Food preparation workers: jobs and pay since 1946}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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19001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Kitchen helper / scullion / cafeteria worker (early industrial foodservice)
Known then as Kitchen worker / pantry worker / lunchroom helper
Known then as Food service worker / kitchen aide (NSLP cafeteria era)
Known then as Food preparation worker / prep cook (casual and institutional)
Known then as Food Preparation Workers (BLS SOC 35-2021)
Known today as Food Preparation Workers (BLS SOC 35-2021)
Projected to still be called Food Preparation Workers (BLS SOC 35-2021)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
894K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$35,320
Est.

≈ $34,414 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1885

Food historians cite Kohler & Chase in San Francisco, operating a counter-service self-serve lunchroom by 1885, among the first American cafeteria-style operations: the model that requires a kitchen crew dedicated to large-batch production rather than à la carte service. The cafeteria concept (the word borrowed from a Spanish term for coffee shop) spread rapidly through American cities in the 1880s and 1890s as urban workers needed fast, cheap midday meals. Each cafeteria required a back-of-house team of workers doing prep rather than line cooking: the first structural articulation of what would become SOC 35-2021.

Beat · 1902

Horn & Hardart opens the first American Automat at 818 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia on June 9, 1902. The Automat's front-of-house innovation, coin-operated compartments dispensing pre-prepared food, depended entirely on an invisible back-of-house workforce preparing soups, stews, baked goods, and sandwiches in large batches and restocking compartments through the wall. At peak, 157 Automat locations served 500,000 patrons daily: one of the largest food-service workforces of the pre-WWII era. The Automat is the first large-scale proof that institutional volume food preparation was a distinct, necessary, and scalable labor category.

Beat · 1936

Davre and Henry Davidson found Davidson Brothers in Southern California in 1936, providing vending services to aviation industry workers: the seed of what will become Aramark. The managed-services model the Davidsons pioneered (contract to operate food service for an institution rather than owning a restaurant) would scale through the 1950s into a dominant employment structure for food preparation workers. ARA, Automatic Retailers of America, is formed in 1959; the modern Aramark brand is adopted in 1994. By the 2020s Aramark employs roughly 278,000 globally, with the majority in food-service roles concentrated in the prep tier.

Beat · 1946

President Truman signs the National School Lunch Act on June 4, 1946, establishing the National School Lunch Program that will provide subsidized meals to millions of American children in school cafeterias. The NSLA creates an immediate, federally-mandated demand for school cafeteria workers in every participating school district: workers who prep vegetables, heat batch-produced proteins, ladle sides, and serve students through cafeteria lines. By 1970 the program is feeding approximately 22 million children daily. The school cafeteria becomes the largest single institutional employer of food preparation workers in the United States: a position it holds into the 2020s.

Beat · 1966

Pierre Bellon founds Sodexho in Marseille, France in 1966, beginning with marine catering services and expanding through Africa and Europe before entering North America. In 1983 Sodexho lists on the Paris Bourse and accelerates international expansion. In 1998, Sodexho merges with Marriott Management Services, at the time one of the largest institutional food service companies in North America, giving it immediate scale across American hospital, university, and corporate dining contracts. The Sodexho-Marriott merger transfers hundreds of thousands of US food-service workers (including the prep tier) to Sodexho management. The company rebrands as Sodexo (without the final h) in 2008.

Beat · 2014

Chowbotics is founded with a singular thesis: the salad-assembly task (reaching into ingredient bins, portioning by weight into a bowl) is automatable. Their robot "Sally" is a vending-machine-sized unit that dispenses pre-portioned ingredients from temperature-controlled canisters. Sally is deployed in hospital cafeterias, corporate campuses, and hotels from roughly 2016. DoorDash acquires Chowbotics in February 2021 for a reported ~$46 million, seeing it as a component of automated delivery kitchens. By June 2022, DoorDash shuts Chowbotics down entirely. Sally cost approximately $35,000, still required a human for stocking and cleaning, could only do salad assembly from pre-cut ingredients, and competed against workers earning $13-16/hr who could perform a full range of kitchen prep tasks. The unit economics never closed. The Chowbotics shutdown is the canonical case study in why food-prep automation against low-wage labor is harder than it looks.

Beat · 2021

Sweetgreen acquires Spyce, a Boston restaurant founded by four MIT students that uses robotic cooking pots and conveyor assembly for grain bowls, in August 2021. Sweetgreen shuts the two existing Spyce locations and redirects the engineering team toward developing its "Infinite Kitchen" concept. The Infinite Kitchen integrates robotic portioning and assembly into the restaurant's physical design from the ground up: a conveyor system that moves bowls past ingredient dispensers to assemble salads and grain bowls from pre-cut, pre-prepped ingredients. The first Infinite Kitchen location opens in Naperville, Illinois in May 2023. By Q1 2024, Infinite Kitchen locations post 28% restaurant-level margins against the chain's 18.1% standard: the first credible commercial proof that robotic assembly can close financially in food service. The critical caveat: the automation handles portioning and assembly only. Human food preparation workers still cut, wash, marinate, and cook all ingredients upstream.

Beat · 2022

COVID-19 and the Great Resignation restructure institutional foodservice labor. School cafeterias that had operated with reduced crews during remote learning returned to full service in fall 2021, facing severe worker shortages: USDA reported that 83% of school nutrition directors said staffing was their greatest challenge in the 2021-22 school year. Hospital foodservice, which had maintained operations throughout COVID, similarly reported difficulty filling food preparation positions. Managed-service contractors began offering sign-on bonuses ($500-$1,000) for prep positions that had previously required none. The combination of post-pandemic labor shortages and the visibility of food prep worker conditions during COVID contributed to a modest wage increase in the category: median pay for food preparation workers rose from approximately $24,000 in 2019 to $34,220 by 2024, a 42% nominal increase over five years, though still well below inflation-adjusted historical comparisons.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace food preparation workers? 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 published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
-3%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 35-2021 (Food preparation workers): 908.5 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 881.3 thousand in 2035, a change of -27.2 thousand (-3.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
87%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 35-2021 Food Preparation Workers: probability of computerisation 0.87, rank 508 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
4.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 35-2021.00 Food Preparation Workers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.046, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.093; GPT-4-rated β 0.037. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for food preparation workers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is taking this onOperate fryers and other cooking stations for high-volume prep items (fries, chicken tenders, onion rings): load baskets, monitor oil temperature and cook times, and ensure consistent output quality across hundreds of daily portions.

Operate fryers and other cooking stations for high-volume prep items (fries, chicken tenders, onion rings): load baskets, monitor oil temperature and cook times, and ensure consistent output quality across hundreds of daily portions.[6],[3]

Where your edge is

Learn Flippy or equivalent robotic fryer operation and maintenance so you are the crew member who keeps the robot running, not the one replaced by it. Robotic fryer installations still require human oversight for oil changes, basket cleaning, and exception handling when items jam or overflow.

AI is taking this onPrepare pizza, flatbread, and similar assembled items: apply sauce and cheese per recipe spec, distribute toppings evenly, and manage throughput to match oven capacity

Prepare pizza, flatbread, and similar assembled items: apply sauce and cheese per recipe spec, distribute toppings evenly, and manage throughput to match oven capacity; adapt for custom or dietary-modification orders.[7],[11]

Where your edge is

Where Picnic Works or similar systems are deployed, the operator role shifts to loading ingredients into the machine, clearing jams, and handling custom/modified orders the robot cannot process. Developing allergen awareness and custom-order fluency keeps the human role relevant.

AI is sitting alongside you hereAssemble cold food items, salads, wraps, and bowls according to standardized recipes: layer ingredients in correct sequence, apply dressings and toppings, and portion to spec for both in-person and digital orders.

Assemble cold food items, salads, wraps, and bowls according to standardized recipes: layer ingredients in correct sequence, apply dressings and toppings, and portion to spec for both in-person and digital orders.[4],[5]

Where your edge is

Develop the speed and accuracy to match robotic assembly output on in-person orders while learning to monitor and quality-check automated assembly for digital orders. Customizations, allergen substitutions, and guest-facing interaction remain human work.

Where food preparation workers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

Food prep workers who demonstrate reliability, food safety knowledge, and the ability to manage task flow across a kitchen are the natural pipeline for shift supervisor and kitchen manager positions. The BLS projects supervisor openings to remain stable as restaurants need experienced humans to oversee robotic equipment and train new staff. Workers who document food safety compliance accurately and communicate with management proactively are typically promoted within a few years.

What you'd add
  • · Food safety certification (ServSafe Manager or equivalent, one-day exam)
  • · Basic labor scheduling and cost-of-goods awareness
  • · Kitchen Display System and POS system proficiency
  • · Conflict resolution and team communication in a fast-paced environment
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of food preparation workers changed since 1885?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Hand tools + open-range batch cooking (early cafeteria kitchen)

    The early American cafeteria kitchen, as at the 1885 Kohler & Chase counter-service lunchroom in San Francisco and the 1902 Horn & Hardart Automat in Philadelphia, ran on hand tools: cleavers, French knives, box graters, mandolines, and stock pots over gas or coal ranges. The prep worker's core task was volume: reducing large quantities of raw ingredients into the portions that would feed hundreds of customers in a short service window. Speed and physical endurance defined the role. There was no mechanization in the modern sense; a cafeteria kitchen's productivity was entirely a function of how many hands could work simultaneously in the available space. The Horn & Hardart back-of-house, hidden from view behind the Automat's coin-operated walls, was organized as a production line: one worker cleaning, another slicing, another ladling into compartments, all at scale and on a schedule.

  • Commercial refrigeration + Hobart slicer + steam table (institutional kitchen standardization)

    Mechanical refrigeration became viable for commercial kitchens by the 1920s and was widespread by the 1930s, fundamentally changing how institutional kitchens organized prep work. Where pre-refrigeration kitchens had to prep daily, vegetables could not be cut more than a few hours ahead, refrigeration allowed prep workers to process ingredients a day or two in advance and hold them safely. The Hobart commercial meat slicer (Hobart Manufacturing Company, Troy, Ohio) became standard equipment in institutional kitchens through the 1930s and 1940s, mechanizing the most repetitive cutting task and reducing the hand-fatigue component of the prep worker's day. Steam tables, insulated trays that held prepared food at service temperature with hot water circulating underneath, became the primary serving infrastructure for the school cafeteria model created by the 1946 National School Lunch Act, and required prep workers to produce food in batch quantities precisely matched to the steam table system's capacity.

  • Aramark / Sodexo / Compass institutional foodservice model: contract managed services

    The founding and expansion of institutional foodservice management companies through the 1950s-1980s created the organizational structure that employs the largest share of food preparation workers today. Aramark (founded 1936 as Davidson Brothers, restructured as ARA, Automatic Retailers of America, in 1959) pioneered the managed-services model: a company contracts to operate the food service for a hospital, university, prison, or corporation, supplying both the management systems and the labor. Sodexo (founded in Marseille, France in 1966 by Pierre Bellon, US operations expanding from 1983, merger with Marriott Management Services in 1998) built a similar operation. Compass Group (founded 1941 as Factory Canteens Limited in the UK, US market entry 1996 through the Eurest subsidiary) completed the triopoly that collectively accounts for hundreds of thousands of US food service workers across all categories. For the food preparation worker, the managed-services model meant standardized recipes, centralized purchasing, and systematic training: a professionalization of the institutional kitchen that raised baseline hygiene and safety standards even as it suppressed wages through contract competition.

  • Combi-oven + commercial food processor + HACCP compliance systems

    The combination convection-steam oven (combi-oven), commercially available from the 1970s and standard in institutional kitchens by the late 1980s-1990s, changed the heat-based prep task: a single combi-oven could simultaneously steam-cook vegetables at precise humidity levels while roasting proteins at precise internal temperature, reducing the constant monitoring previously required of prep workers managing multiple cooking vessels. Commercial food processors (Robot Coupe [founded France, 1960; US market from 1973] became the standard institutional kitchen tool for large-volume slicing, dicing, and shredding) mechanized the volume cutting tasks that had previously required dedicated hand-cutting workers. HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) compliance systems, mandated in school nutrition programs through USDA policy from the 1990s, added documentation and temperature-logging requirements to the prep worker role: the first significant administrative layer on what had previously been a purely physical job.

  • Chowbotics "Sally" robot salad assembly (2014–2022): the canonical automation failure

    Chowbotics was founded in 2014 with a specific thesis: the salad-assembly task performed by food preparation workers (reaching into bins of pre-cut vegetables, portioning each ingredient by weight, assembling in a bowl) was sufficiently repetitive and well-defined to be automated. Their robot, "Sally," was a vending-machine-sized unit with ingredient canisters that would dispense measured portions of pre-cut ingredients into a bowl on command. Sally was deployed in hospital cafeterias, corporate campuses, and hotel lobbies starting around 2016-2017. DoorDash acquired Chowbotics in February 2021, reportedly for around $46 million, as part of an ambition to build automated food preparation into delivery kitchens. By June 2022, DoorDash shut Chowbotics down entirely. The unit economics never closed against the labor cost it was designed to replace.

    Effect on the work

    The failure reinforced the economics argument that food prep automation only closes financially when integrated into a restaurant designed around the robot from the ground up, not retrofitted into existing prep workflows.

  • Sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen: robotic assembly integrated from design (2021 Spyce acquisition, 2023 deployment)

    In August 2021, Sweetgreen acquired Spyce, a Boston startup founded by four MIT students that had operated a robotic fast-casual restaurant since 2018. Where Chowbotics tried to retrofit automation into existing cafeteria settings, the Spyce/Infinite Kitchen concept built the automation into the restaurant's design: a conveyor-based system that portions and assembles salad bowls from pre-cut ingredients held in temperature-controlled stations, integrated with digital ordering. Sweetgreen opened its first Infinite Kitchen location in Naperville, Illinois in May 2023. By Q1 2024, Infinite Kitchen locations were posting 28% restaurant-level profit margins, compared to 18.1% across the chain's standard locations. The key qualifier: the Infinite Kitchen's automation is confined to the assembly step, it does not cut, wash, or marinate. Human food preparation workers still perform all upstream prep. The automation eliminated the assembly-line worker for high-volume salad portioning at a purpose-built location; it has not eliminated the prep worker who cuts the vegetables those machines portion.

    Effect on the work

    The Infinite Kitchen model suggests that robotic bowl assembly can succeed when designed in rather than retrofitted, but its labor displacement is narrower than the headline suggests. Sweetgreen still employs food prep workers for vegetable cutting, protein cooking, and sauce preparation; the automation handles portioning and assembly. This is a task-substitution story rather than an occupation-substitution story, consistent with the pattern seen in Chipotle's Autocado avocado robot (which cores and peels avocados but does not make guacamole) and in Miso Robotics' Flippy (which manages fry baskets but not the surrounding kitchen).

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Food Preparation Workers employment and pay by year

On record since1885
Latest US employment893,600 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$35,320 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 9263)

    Employment, 2025
    322,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 9263 Kitchen and catering assistants, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £11,840, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 9263 Kitchen and catering assistants, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 8513)

    Employment, 2025
    142,700, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 8513 Kitchenhands, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$67,184, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,292 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1946300,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1950n/a$1,800Est., Univ. of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
1970600,000n/aEst., USDA Food and Nutrition Service Researched contextReport
1980n/a$7,800Est., Univ. of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
2000847,810n/aBLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003852,890$16,470BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004863,700$16,710BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005880,360$17,040BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006871,470$17,410BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007873,470$18,150BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008880,480$18,630BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009849,400$19,020BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010802,650$19,100BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011775,140$19,270BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012785,370$19,300BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013824,080$19,440BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014850,220$19,560BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015862,740$20,180BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016850,670$21,440BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017832,690$22,730BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018814,600$23,730BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019863,740$24,800BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020793,590$26,070BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021783,350$28,780BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022904,330$29,790BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023879,610$32,420BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024888,770$34,220BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025893,600$35,320BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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