Make food items reappear after it was eaten?

How do you guys make items reappear at certain times after it has been destroyed?
I want to generate random food objects in a scene and have player eat them. After a while the food objects will respawn back in the scene so player can find them and eat again.
What's the best way to approach this?
Should I use scriptable objects or prefabs for this? (I have looked up several tutorials but still can't quite wrap my head around the concepts of prefabs and scriptable objects)

 

You can start by having a script that's in charge of spawning the food and getting notified when that spawned food has been eaten, then you can just call unity's Invoke function to delay the respawn.

The spawner would need a reference to the object to be spawned in the form of a prefab, and the prefab would need a reference to the spawner (that reference's set on spawn) so it can notify when it's been eaten.

Then you would put one spawner for each food item you want to be respawned on the scene.

 

For perfomace I would do it with a single component and a bunch of spawn points

 

I would do it depending on the food I want to spawn. If you eat a carrot, will a carrot always appear again? Or a cupcake may appear. If it will be the same, I would just disable the carrot and enable it after few moments (object pooling), else I would use MDADigital solution.

 

Why wouldnt that work with my approach? Just have transform fro each spawnpoint. It can have a monob that points out stuff like which items are possible to spawn on that point etc.

 

When I said you approach wouldn't work? I just clarify that it could be done differently if it is always the same object, not that it can't be done just with a single MonoBehavior, moreover object polling is used to be done with a single manager instance.