Assist in the provision of food service and nutritional programs, under the supervision of a dietitian. May plan and produce meals based on established guidelines, teach principles of food and nutrition, or counsel individuals.
U.S. Workers
29,950
Median Salary
$37,040
10-Year Growth
+2.5%
Annual Openings
4,000
Typical entry: Associate's degree
12 of 12 tasks have some AI capability
Exposure Trend
This score reflects estimated AI technical capability for tasks in this occupation. It does not predict employment changes, and it does not account for company-specific constraints, regulation, or adoption barriers.
Plan menus or diets or guide individuals or families in food selection, preparation, or menu planning, based upon nutritional needs and established guidelines.
AI: Fully automatable - AI can generate nutritionally appropriate menus and personalized diet guidance from client data and established guidelines, enabling full automation of menu and diet planning in many contexts.
Determine food and beverage costs and assist in implementing cost control procedures.
AI: Fully automatable - AI can compute food and beverage costs from ingredient and pricing data and recommend and help implement cost‑control procedures, effectively automating cost determination and assistance.
Develop job specifications, job descriptions, or work schedules.
AI: Fully automatable - AI can draft job specifications and descriptions and generate optimized work schedules from constraints and inputs, effectively automating these HR tasks.
Deliver speeches on diet, nutrition, or health to promote healthy eating habits and illness prevention and treatment.
AI: Fully automatable - AI can write speeches, synthesize natural speech and deliver talks virtually or via synthetic voices, enabling full automation of speech delivery in many contexts.
Provide dietitians with assistance researching food, nutrition, or food service systems.
AI: Fully automatable - Researching food, nutrition, and food‑service systems is primarily information work that AI can comprehensively perform, synthesize, and present to dietitians.
Conduct nutritional assessments of individuals, including obtaining and evaluating individuals' dietary histories, to plan nutritional programs.
AI: Partial - AI can collect dietary histories via digital tools and perform nutritional evaluations to draft programs, but lacks full clinical judgement and in‑person assessment capabilities for complete autonomy.
Observe patient food intake and report progress and dietary problems to dietician.
AI: Partial - AI can assist with automated monitoring (cameras, sensors) and generate reports in some settings but cannot fully replicate in‑person observation and clinical judgement for every case.
Prepare a major meal, following recipes and determining group food quantities.
AI: Partial - AI can scale recipes, calculate group quantities and provide step‑by‑step instructions, but cannot physically prepare meals.
Supervise food production or service or assist dietitians or nutritionists in food service supervision or planning.
AI: Partial - AI can support planning, scheduling, monitoring and decision support for food production and service but cannot fully replace on‑site human supervision and interpersonal management.
Analyze menus or recipes, standardize recipes, or test new products.
AI: Partial - AI can analyze and standardize recipes and predict nutritional profiles but cannot fully perform physical product testing or substitute human sensory panels.
Refer patients to other relevant services to provide continuity of care.
AI: Partial - AI can generate referral recommendations and prepared referral documents but cannot fully replace human clinical judgment, consent management, and local coordination in all cases.
Select, schedule, or conduct orientation or in-service education programs.
AI: Partial - AI can design content and automate scheduling and virtual delivery, but selecting, tailoring, and live facilitation of in‑service orientation often still requires human oversight and interpersonal management.