Will AI replace Food and Tobacco Roasting, Baking, and Drying Machine Operators and Tenders?
AI reaches little of this job’s work.
7/100
Low exposure
More exposed to AI than 14% of US workers.
- AI already used in
- 0% of the work
- As AI tools mature: up to
- 14% of the work
What the job involves
Operate or tend food or tobacco roasting, baking, or drying equipment, including hearth ovens, kiln driers, roasters, char kilns, and vacuum drying equipment.
Where AI reaches the work
The job’s main tasks, heaviest first, by how far AI reaches them.
Within reach(2)
- Record production data, such as weight and amount of product processed, type of product, and time and temperature of processing.
- Signal coworkers to synchronize flow of materials.
Out of reach(17)
- Observe, feel, taste, or otherwise examine products during and after processing to ensure conformance to standards.
- Observe flow of materials and listen for machine malfunctions, such as jamming or spillage, and notify supervisors if corrective actions fail.
- Observe temperature, humidity, pressure gauges, and product samples and adjust controls, such as thermostats and valves, to maintain prescribed operating conditions for specific stages.
- Set temperature and time controls, light ovens, burners, driers, or roasters, and start equipment, such as conveyors, cylinders, blowers, driers, or pumps.
- Weigh or measure products, using scale hoppers or scale conveyors.
and 12 more
Also called
Coffee Roaster · Oven Operator · Roaster · Drier Operator · Smoker · Corn Popper · Drum Drier · Fish Smoker
Related jobs
What these numbers mean
The score is the share of this job’s work, weighted by how important and frequent each task is, that AI could do in half the time: tasks an AI model could do alone count in full, tasks that need software built on AI count half.
“AI already used” is the share of the work in tasks where people are recorded using AI today. “As AI tools mature” counts every task AI could halve, with or without extra software.
The percentile compares the score with every job’s, weighted by how many people in the US do each one. Exposure means AI could change how the work is done, not that the job goes away. These are estimates for the typical job, not predictions.
Sources
- O*NET 31.0 Database, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration
- GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs (task labels), Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin & Rock (2023), OpenAI and University of Pennsylvania
- Anthropic Economic Index: labor market impacts (task penetration), Anthropic
- Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 (national and metropolitan areas), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics