I seriously wonder if these guys (and they are mainly guys) have ever cooked before. Seriously, you go from upper-middle class+ upbringing to 4-10 years at Stanford to eating every single meal out because no time working on startup... like literally every twentysomething "founder type" I ever met lived on takeout and couldn't cook for shit. Cooking is so obviously the absolute last thing that's ever going to get automated, as anybody that's spent appreciable amounts of time in the kitchen can tell you. I can only assume the disrupters are drawn to this industry because they suppose, wrongly, that everyone hates to cook as much as they do.
A lot of cooking has been automated, though. Consider an industrial bakery, or frozen pizza factory, or your favorite candy. We just don't normally call automated food production "cooking".
But those aren't cooking, they're pastry, basically pastry, and confection (aka pastry), respectively. You literally attend a different program in culinary academy to learn these skills. Show me any place that mass produces actual meals and I guarantee you it looks like this photo of SkyChef I found online:
Granted, and I suppose the nature of the craft does inherently lend itself to better automation. (For anyone who doesn't know, much of what makes pastries good boils down to precise measurements and temperature controls, which even unsophisticated machines can beat human chefs on.)
