| > I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop. There must be, running an open-loop process is rather tricky. If it's like any other process in food manufacturing, there are likely both continuous automated checks of trivially measurable properties and regular (every hour or less) manual lab tests[0]. > These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook. As I understand their process (from what little I read and watched about it in the past), the keystone of it is minimizing input variance at every stage. They stick to specific varieties of potatoes, they keep bun production centralized, they place specific requirements on slaughterhouses for the meat they then blend into standardized pulp, etc. This makes it possible to constrain variance downstream - e.g. the meat pulp has roughly uniform properties, so it can be shaped and processed in tightly controlled fashion. At the end come pre-processed food pieces that are then shipped to restaurants for assembly. McDonald's venues don't really cook this food, they put it through the last stage of processing pipeline - heating it in programmable ovens/fryers. Restaurant workers aren't making any cooking decisions. That's how McDonald's ensures its product consistency - there's no place left for a human to screw things up. -- [0] - Industrial food processing plants have labs on-site, which receive samples from the production line on an ongoing basis. This is used to check the batches for contamination / pathogens, verify measurements from automated sensors, and to provide ground-truth data for models used in model predictive controllers, if such are used in the process. |