Select food items from serving or storage areas and place them in dishes, on serving trays, or in take-out bags.

“Select food items from serving or storage areas and place them in dishes, on serving trays, or in take-out bags.” is a core task performed by Fast Food and Counter Workers. Among the occupation's 28 rated tasks, workers place it 16th by importance (#13 most important). About 66% of workers say it is relevant to their job.

This is a single occupation-specific task statement from O*NET. The figures below describe how central the task is to the job and what independent studies measure about AI and this kind of work — not a prediction that the task will be automated.

Work activities this task rolls up to

O*NET groups concrete tasks into broader work activities shared across many occupations.

• Prepare foods or beverages. in Handling and Moving Objects

AI exposure

The OpenAI / Eloundou “GPTs are GPTs” study rates this task E0. No direct exposure — current language models give little or no time savings on this task.

Exposure measures whether a model could meaningfully speed the task up — it is an estimate of overlap with model capabilities, not a measure of whether the work will be done by software. The study's intermediate score (β) for this task is 0.00. Automation potential label: T0.

Other tasks in this occupation

• Accept payment from customers, and make change as necessary. · importance 4.4
• Serve customers in eating places that specialize in fast service and inexpensive carry-out food. · importance 4.4
• Perform personnel activities, such as supervising and training employees. · importance 4.4
• Request and record customer orders, and compute bills, using cash registers, multi-counting machines, or pencil and paper. · importance 4.4
• Balance receipts and payments in cash registers. · importance 4.3
• Add relishes and garnishes to food orders, according to instructions. · importance 4.3
• Communicate with customers regarding orders, comments, and complaints. · importance 4.3
• Serve food, beverages, or desserts to customers in such settings as take-out counters of restaurants or lunchrooms, business or industrial establishments, hotel rooms, and cars. · importance 4.2
• Monitor and order supplies or food items, and restock as necessary to maintain inventory. · importance 4.2
• Perform cleaning duties, such as sweeping, mopping, and washing dishes, to keep equipment and facilities sanitary. · importance 4.2
• Distribute food to servers. · importance 4.2
• Brew coffee and tea, and fill containers with requested beverages. · importance 4.1
• Clean and organize eating, service, and kitchen areas. · importance 4.1
• Prepare daily food items, and cook simple foods and beverages, such as sandwiches, salads, soups, pizza, or coffee, using proper safety precautions and sanitary measures. · importance 4.1

See all tasks on the Fast Food and Counter Workers page.

Sources for this page

Every figure above traces to a named public dataset and the exact release below — not hand-written opinion. See the full methodology for what each measure does and does not mean.

• O*NET 30.3 U.S. Department of Labor / National Center for O*NET Development
• “GPTs are GPTs” (Eloundou et al.) arXiv 2303.10130 OpenAI / academic

Data compiled June 2, 2026. Figures are estimates, not advice.

@misc{singulariki-task-23116,
  title  = {Select food items from serving or storage areas and place them in dishes, on serving trays, or in take-out bags.},
  author = {{Singulariki}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {O*NET 30.3; “GPTs are GPTs” (Eloundou et al.) arXiv 2303.10130. Accessed June 7, 2026},
  url    = {https://singulariki.com/tasks/task-23116}
}