In a trade that turns entirely on human contact, we keep organising more distance between guest and maker. QR codes and order kiosks are the best-known example. In food retail and in restaurant concepts grinding towards black figures under efficiency pressure, contact with the guest slips further into the background. For a trade whose right to exist rests on personal service, that is a danger.
The sandwich often tastes better when you can see who made it. Behind the order kiosk a strange play unfolds: people running automated production processes for the sake of the human touch. The result is speed, but rarely attention. You are glad of the convenience, but somewhere between the retouched picture, the process and your own appetite, a cocktail of confusion, disappointment and wasted euros takes shape.
Not bad for a side job
It is striking that we increasingly try to organise hospitality as an efficient system, just as the sector's economic weight becomes clearer. Since 2000 hospitality's share of total food consumption has grown steadily, from around 20 percent to 30 percent since 2015. After the covid dip we have been back at 2019 levels since 2023, and in the Netherlands we sit at around 30 percent of all food consumption, worth 23 billion euros in 2025 and heading towards 24 billion in 2026. Not bad for a side job.
A large part of the rebound after covid comes from price rises, but the direction of travel is clear: eating out is no longer a treat at the edges of life, it is a growing share of how a country feeds itself.
Hospitality will be the least affected by AI
Hospitality grows economically and stays human work. It is striking, then, how hard we try to organise it without people. After construction and craft, healthcare, and then personal services such as hairdressers and masseurs, safety and emergency services, hospitality will be among the least affected by AI. Microsoft researchers presented exactly this at Wharton University in 2025.
Of course elements of almost every occupation will be touched by AI. In hospitality it will mostly play a role in staff planning, forecasting and bookkeeping, tasks that are already fairly automated today.
Hospitality stays human work
These human-to-human trades have a somewhat more stable outlook than, say, law, consultancy and marketing. What stands out is that the occupations most exposed to AI are now the ones that command high social standing and high salaries. The pandemic showed how valuable these human-to-human roles are for our wellbeing. That is exactly why the way we treat people in this trade is no side issue.
Economic popularity comes with a human-to-human performance pressure that catapults owners and managers back to the 1980s and 1990s and ignores modern norms of behaviour. Hospitality stays human work. Human dignity should not be the dish of the day, but the speciality of the house. A trade that lives on attention can afford an efficient system, as long as the guest never gets the feeling that they have become one too.
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Thijs Koster
Co-founder, My Treats
