Many baked goods are much better when they still have their cooking warmth. Some foods, like pizza, are nearly always served this way, but others are only done this way occasionally. Several companies have used this to offer a much tastier product than you'd normally get:
Midwest Airlines chocolate chip cookies, which they would bake fresh on-board. Good for a cookie, let alone an airline cookie.
Bertucci's rolls, a somewhat typical roll that is famously delicious because it's served just out of the oven.
Krispy Kreme doughnuts, with a "hot now" light so people know when they can get them right out of the fryer.
Some of this is that in cases where it's not that hard to serve it fresh it's unexceptional to serve it that way. You wouldn't normally eat waffles, pancakes, crepes, popovers, or pasta except completely fresh. Thinking about why we do these this way, I think it's that they're operationally simple: short cooking times and small minimum batch sizes. Bertucci's and Midwest handle this by serving the same product to everyone, which really only works if you make it a central aspect of your identity.
If we could sort out the operational aspects of timing and preparation, it seems like we could be generally eating a lot tastier food. Burgers on fresh-baked buns, etc. Improvements here could be well-received!
Many meals have prep work which scales extremely well, but are incompatible with small sizes.
A way to take advantage of such a property would be to have a central facility produce lots of high-quality meals for lots of people, serving them hot and fresh at the appropriate time.
Having invented the cafeteria/mess hall model of dining, the problem is in implementing such a result over a large enough scale to be viable. That scale is going to be roughly the number of people that will eat a batch of bread in a sitting while it is still hot and fresh, where the batch size is near the capacity of one person.
Solving the schedule problem and having enough people share mealtimes to make that worthwhile seems difficult on the 10-50 person range, but might get easier above 100 (since the serving window must be longer, so the batches can be timed to be ready at intervals during that window with little extra effort; putting a couple trays of cookie into the oven every 10 minutes is reasonable if you have 10 trays and a 1-hour serving window; having a 1-hour serving window for hot cookies is unreasonable if you are only making a couple dozen.)
In my experience, cafeterias are more likely trying to be inoffensive to everybody than to be trying to reduce costs, and in any case their costs per person are lower than the per-person costs of preparing comparable food at most, if not all, qualities of food.
The line between cafeteria and buffet restaurant isn't perfectly defined, and I think that there are already businesses that operate on a cash-per-eater basis that are substantially high-end cafeterias. Shifting to a pay-per-month basis for them seems plausible, but I'm not sure if they ge... (read more)