If you have a system with low turnover of staff then intuitive is not the goal.
The goal is to efficiently transfer information with additional steps in a common language.
A similar example is the hand signals from the old trading exchange floors [1]. The point wasn't for it to be easy to learn. The point was to make it easy to transfer visual information across a very loud and boisterous place. Plus, you had to do it with both people you knew well and people you may never have worked with before.
> Still would take a lot of training to get right.
I don't think it would take that much extra training, especially compared to whatever shorthand a waitress or ordering system would have to use.
And it seems like it's something that's possible to get right. All the alternatives I can think of suffer from serious problems this one doesn't (e.g. having to mentally keep track of the correspondence between the order ticket and palate, which invites lots of error).
> Its not intuitive.
It actually seems pretty intuitive. There appears to be a pretty clear correspondence between the code and what it means in most cases.
