> food in the developed world is mostly a manufacturing business, especially if you count it in terms of calories affected rather than revenue earned (there are

> food in the developed world is mostly a manufacturing business, especially if you count it in terms of calories affected rather than revenue earned (there are some high-margin service elements in there, but a lot of them start with more mass-produced ingredients). The most factory-like food experiences most people interact with are fast-food restaurants, which rigorously manage themselves around revenue per foot and revenue per worker-hour. The big franchises have, over the decades, gotten very good at getting the maximum revenue out of both—next time you're in a fast-food restaurant, think of all the worker-hours that went into every detail of the menu, layout, pricing, and consider how it's amortized ~$10 at a time. Entire lifetimes worth of effort have been devoted to the question of how to increase your probability of adding McNuggets to an order.