Really Fresh Baking

Not just baked goods. Most cooked food is best when still very warm from it's original cook, rather than cold or re-heated. Further, most vegetables are better when eaten within a few hours of picking. I think you're underestimating the logistical problems, though. The convenience and cost savings of storing and transporting pre-prepped food items is enormous.

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Been meaning to write a version of this for a while, but more detailed.

I'm late to this, I know, but came here from another post on bread matters, and just wanted to say that for bread (not small bread-like things such as pizza etc) it is my impression that eating it warm is preferable only when the quality of ingredients and process is not of the highest. With better quality bread, I find it much tastier -- eaten plain, no melting butter to muddy the waters -- when it has fully cooled.

I also disagree that "most cooked food is best when still very warm from it's original cook". Depends on what you mean by "most" obviously, but slow-cooked stews are often better reheated because the flavours become more integrated. I don't know of any experimental tests with trained tasters. Maybe it is just cooks' lore, but I find it to be true.

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.)

You could use a small breadmaking machine. Make a large tub of flour mixture and a vat of wet ingredients with a dedicated scoop for each. Or scratch a mark on the bottom of the bread machine itself for the level the wet ingredients should be at, so you don't have to deal with washing an oily measuring scoop. Then just pour them in and turn the machine on three times a day. Many models have a delay start timer so that you can wake up to fresh bread.

Based on this, it sounds like you could have a hot fresh loaf every meal in exchange for a few minutes of pouring ingredients, mixing, and cleaning.

Here's the catch.

The small machines make 1-lb loaves. A grocery store loaf is 1.7 lbs. Industry standard is 18 slices per loaf, so a 1-lb should give you about 10 slices. If you like 2 slices of bread per serving, each "small" loaf is enough for 5 people who want bread every single meal. Sounds workable for a family of 4-5 or a cafeteria setting.

If you were cooking for just yourself, you'd be throwing away about 2.5 pounds of cold bread every day. If you were cooking for yourself and a partner, it's more like 1.2 pounds, but try convincing most people to not feel bad about that kind of food waste. Can't just give away the extras, because it would all be partly-eaten loaves, not nice pretty whole loaves.

My guess is that the end result for 1-2 eaters would be you'd make one loaf per day and eat cold bread the rest of the time. That might still be an improvement. But then there's that pesky hedonistic treadmill to worry about...