My class wanted to use our skills in data analytics to potentially help restaurants in our community. In Osborne, we are lacking in a variety of food options. We realized that we had new businesses opening and older businesses that needed aid in keeping the doors open. We thought the results of our survey could help better existing restaurants while helping to develop new restaurants.
To get started, we created a survey using Google, containing multiple questions based on the experience, food quality, cleanliness, types of food, etc of restaurants. Then we created a video to encourage people to fill out our survey and pushed these out onto our school’s social media platforms, asking people to complete our survey but also help promote it by sharing it with others.
We received a total of 259 responses on our survey from different places around the world including 17 of our 50 states. Although we don’t consider this to be “big data '' in data analyst terms, we were satisfied with the turnout of our survey, because we were able to reach a greater audience than just Osborne County, giving us a more diverse data set.
As I started working with the data, I began to wonder if people with dietary needs eat out less. I created a treemap that displayed the variety of dietary needs within my surveyors. Then, I took this information and made circle graphs representing how often people go out to eat who either do or don’t have dietary needs. I wanted to pursue this topic further, so I created a bar graph comparing the most popular food choices for the group of surveyors who do have specific needs based on those that go out to eat 2-3 times a month.
These four graphs show that people with dietary needs do eat out less than people who don’t have dietary needs. Out of our surveyors that have dietary needs, we found they typically eat out 2-3 times a month compared to the opposite group who tend to go 1-2 times per week, so I wanted to focus on this group as well as what a restaurant could do to entice them to visit their establishment more frequently.
Based on my findings, here are a few ways restaurants could accommodate these individuals. I discovered in my final graph that this group prefers Thai, Mexican, and/or Pizza/Pasta cuisines, so I would recommend having dishes within that cuisine on the menu that are also created with dietary needs in mind. Menus could be created using icons to label dishes that will be safe for people with dietary needs, or it could include a separate section with all the items for people with dietary needs listed in one place. If it’s uneconomical to provide these daily, restaurants could have a daily or weekly special for people with dietary needs along with regular menu items for the rest of their customers. Lastly, advertisements regarding these menu changes are the best way to get people in the door. Social media platforms greatly promote restaurants, because owners can post regularly with immediate access to consumers.