> "artisanal" thing is mostly hype. I strongly disagree. Food manufacturing is a process with a massive amount of variables, which we can neither model nor con

> "artisanal" thing is mostly hype. I strongly disagree. Food manufacturing is a process with a massive amount of variables, which we can neither model nor control for in a factory. Every batch of supplies is slightly different. The flavor trends vary by season, and even in the most controlled environment, things go wrong. Additionally, cooking/food manufacturing often involves extra 'learned' steps that aren't properly documented or understood. It is not that cooking/food-manufacturing can't be automated. But perfect automation of it requires so many sensors, so much multivariate optimization, incredible amount of manual verification and so much modelling.... that it quickly becomes cheaper to just have manual labor balance those all by feel. As someone who worked in highly automated manufacturing lines, the machines we work with all are all faulty in their own little ways. Being able to have an intuition for what just-right looks like and being able to reproduce it manually, has continued to be a difficult problem for all manufacturers. This is doubly true with food, where the scientific processes for certain things are still unknown. I have tried aged American Parmesan cheese blocks and they are objectively worse. Barbeque seems like the most automatable process, yet nothing comes close to a a real pitmaster's brisket. Sometimes the main task of food preservation is simply keen inspection & disposal of bad batches, which remains economically un-automatable. Artisanal products aren't always better (sometimes you need steel extruded dried spaghetti & dusty parmesan), but they are often different & hard to reproduce with a machine.