Project Summary

This project purpose is to find out the market conditions for fast food restaurant in United States. The dataset originally came from kaggle. In this project I were able to do :

Insights

Market Landscape

  1. Most of the fast food restaurants are located in South and Mid West. Further in each of the four regions few states have higher market share than others by large margin. Apart from having large urban centers, favourable business environment may also be factor for ex: lower taxes, state grants in establishing new stores, less stringent labor laws etc.
  2. At National level, California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and Indiana are top states attracting most of the businesses.

Brand Presence

  1. Top Brands have presence in almost all geographies with McDonalds having more stores than others by a considerable margin. This tells us that key growth strategy for Brands has been "Market Development".
  2. McDonalds share is number 1 in all regions followed by Burger King at secomd place.
  3. Given the plentiful presence of brands, there is intense stiff competition in market. This creates added pressure on Brands to differentiate their product offerings which opens up opportunities for Brands to leverage their strengths while others face pressure if they don't adapt in time. In market charecterized by high volume-low margin transactions mere survival may not be best long term strategy.

Health Violation Inspection

  1. Lack of Ventilation, Cleanliness of non food surfaces, food storage and maintenance, Insects and Rodents presence are health codes which are violated often.
  2. In Los Angeles City KFC, McDonalds and Subway are responsible for most violations per store while in Chicago it's McDonalds, Burger King and KFC which fall foul of standards.
  3. McDonalds and KFC are both failing to meet set standards indicating that they are having trouble in managing their store operations. In addition they may be facing risk of store closures if this trend persists.
  4. Frequent fines and penalities erode profit margins and can hurt business.

Yelp Rating - Brand Sentiment

  1. McDonalds, Burger King and KFC have many negative reviews relative to positive ones suggesting that customers are quite dissapointed with their service.
  2. Further analysis of reviews at store level should highlight key problems affecting the business.
  3. This also shows that issues plaguing in running day to day store operations are having an affect on customer experience which may sound the death knell of Brand if not controlled immediately.

Project Files

For a more comprehensive analysis and visualization, please open the project files.

Project Background


Our client wishes to know the growing Fast Food Market. They are on lookout to support Brands which are currently struggling by investing in digital capabilities. We wish to provide them with an assessment of current landscape and learn top brands in marketplace. Apart from this we will also seek to know which brands are falling short of health code inspections and their ratings on Yelp.

Data Scope, Goals & Objectives

1. Fast Food Restaurant America

This dataset is a list of over 10,000 fast food restaurants provided by Datafiniti's Business Database. The dataset includes the restaurant's address, city, latitude and longitude coordinates, name, and more.

2. LA Restaurant & Market Health Data

This is a dataset hosted by the city of Los Angeles.

3. Chicago Food Inspections

This dataset is derived from inspections of restaurants and other food establishments in Chicago.

4. Yelp Dataset

This dataset is a subset of Yelp's businesses, reviews, and user data. It was originally put together for the Yelp Dataset Challenge which is a chance for students to conduct research or analysis on Yelp's data and share their discoveries. In the dataset you'll find information about businesses across 11 metropolitan areas in four countries.

Goals

Our goal is to assess fast food market in United States, and provide analysis based on market landscape, fast food brand violation of health code inspections and their rating on Yelp.

Objectives

  1. Clean raw data using various method and make sure the data is feasible to analyze.
  2. Conduct exploratory data analysis (EDA) to find out the overview fast food restaurant landscape in United States.
  3. Analyze fast food brand presence across United States.
  4. Analyze inspection of health violation data by fast food brands.
  5. Review fast food brand sentiment on yelp data.

Data Cleaning

  1. We cleaned few features containing white spaces that should be removed.
  2. We removed agent and company features due to large missing data and large categorical characteristics.
  3. We were able to engineer a new feature such as total day stays and total guests to simplify the analysis.
  4. We combined arrival date data such as date, month, year to a datetime format.

Data Analysis

Overview of Fast Food Restaurant Landscape


Interpretation:
  1. In West, California makes up 36% of total restaurants , Washington and Arizona are behind.
  2. Texas, Florida are top two markets in South while Pennsylvania, New York lead in North East.
  3. In Mid West, Ohio has highest among all with about 20%.


Interpretation:
  1. Ohio(391), California(350), Texas(347), Florida(309), Indiana(293) are top 5 markets in US.
  2. Montana, Rikers Island, Alaska, Colorado Springs rank least.


Interpretation: With 41.83% of fast food restaurants located South takes the top spot while North East contains only 12.83%. For Brands looking to enter the market or expand their footprint, South and Mid West are favourable.

Analyze Brand Presence by Geographies


Interpretation: McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Wendys, Arbys, KFC and Subway are the most popular Brands. Clearly all the Brands have big presence in South followed by Mid West. There are a few exceptions when compared to overall level. Burger King has more stores in North East than West which tells us that it is priority market for them.


Interpretation:
  1. McDonalds market penetration is above 30% in all regions with highest of 36% in North East.
  2. Burger King has higher penetration in North East after McDonalds. Subway is concentrated more in West while Arbys dominates in MidWest.
  3. Taco Bell has least presence in North East.


Interpretation:
  1. Analyzing by state we learn the top markets for each brand. We observe that they are present in most of the markets.
  2. For McDonalds, Vermont, Texas, Connecticut are key ones. Wendys is present in all states except Delaware and Colorado Springs Arbys is absent in DC, Mississipi, Rikers Island and Vermont, while KFC lacks any stores in Montana.

Inspect Health Violations Data by Brand

We have so far gathered a clear understanding of Fast Foods Restaurants presence across US and as well as learned the geographic footprint of top brands. To aid our understanding of knowing which brands are facing difficulties in running their business so that our PE firm can step in and support, we are going to find out if any health code standards are being broken.

Let us examine Los Angeles and Chicago for this purpose. Both are some of the largest cities in United States.

Los Angeles City, CA


Interpretation: Common Violations appear to be related to Floors, Walls or Non Food contact surfaces lacking cleanliness. Plumbing, Ventilation, Storage of foods/containers are also among the top ones which are frequently cited for violations.


Interpretation:
  1. Subway, McDonalds lead in terms of total violations. This can be explained in part due to higher store counts.
  2. At Violations per store, KFC records 53 while McDonalds, Subway and others are far lower at 24, 21 respectively.
  3. TacoBell and BurgerKing have lowest violations.

If a brand has more stores than their competitors then it is likely to have more violations registered. Henceforth we also would like to know number of stores for which the inspections were carried out by City. In Los Angeles City, it appears that KFC is very bad situation. Burger King and TacoBell despite having higher stores than Wendys and Arbys register fewer violations.

Chicago, IL


Interpretation: Rodents, Insects presence is the main code which is often cited. Protection of food, Sanitizing, Dish/Hand washing are among the top10.


Interpretation: Subway, McDonalds once again fall short of required health standards. Total Violations are high due to presence of many stores. McDonalds, Burger King, KFC lead the fray in failing inspections.

Summary of Health Violation Data

  1. For both Chicago and Los Angeles cities, KFC and McDonalds are among the top 3 brands facing challenges in running their operations. They may already be incurring stiff penalities and repeated offences may cause them to lose their licenses.
  2. McDonalds due to their larger presence in market, could have their troubles tied to other factors.
  3. KFC despite having much fewer stores is unable to meet necessary guidelines and may be in real trouble.

Review Sentiment of Brands on Yelp


Interpretation: Going by shape of distributions, Brands like McDonalds, KFC and Wendys skew lower ratings than others. To have a better understanding lets look at proportion of ratings at Brand level.


Interpretation:
  1. If we consider a rating of 3 (Orange) as Neutral and use it as benchmark to measure amount of positive and negative ratings, we realize that Burger King, KFC and McDonalds contain high amount of less favourable reviews.
  2. Arbys is rated much better than all other brands.

Recommendation

  1. We recommend that if we want to perentrate in fast food market, region of choice could be a requirement to make considerable market and revenue. Assumed that one region could have a leverage than others like lower tax, alx legal requirements, etc.
  2. Because there is stiff competition in the market, consider innovate/differentiate lead products to leverage position compared to other competitors..
  3. Number of violation and rating number highly correlates with number of stores that one brand have (i.e. McDonalds, BK), it is best to expand the market in controlled and timely manner to maintain customer sentiment towards brand.

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