I could see in the not-too-distant future a system, where robots will make the food and assemble the order for the customer to drive up and take. The only employees necessary are the ones to maintain the robots.
“...the ones to maintain the robots.”
No way on earth that would be a franchise employee. That would be an on-call contractor, an employee of another company who arrives in a van and swaps out the terminal plug-plug-plug. Could even be via RF. They get called once every 45 days, if that.
Your envisioned automated cooking and assembly system is pretty close to commercial rollout, with several startups demonstrating full systems integrating automated order, prepping, cooking and assembly of fast-food.
Hardee’s went to Europe to check out an automated burger robot, was very enthusiastic, 300k/store if I remember correctly