U.S. Cuisine Preference: May 2014

Food is arguably the greatest obsession in U.S. Americans simply love their food. No wonder, restaurants/food chains are one of the biggest advertising categories. All kinds of international cuisine find takers here. However, in this piece, we focus on 5 such cuisines - Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Indian and Thai. I have used the "check-in" data from Foursquare to create a food preference map of U.S.

· Top-50 cities by population were short-listed for data analysis since this sample could be reliable indicator of preferences due to the market size it covered. These cities covered 29 states.

· Check-in/user data was extracted for 20 restaurants of each cuisine for every city. So total no. of restaurants analyzed were 20 x 5 x 50 = 5000.

These 5000 restaurants covered about 4.5 million unique users and more than twice as many check-ins.

The following chart shows the top-10 restaurants in U.S. by unique user-base on Foursquare

Ø Top-2 cuisines were Mexican and Italian
Ø States with highest no. of check-ins – California, Texas and NY
Ø Mexican cuisine tops the no. of users for all but two states
Ø Indiana and Ohio had Italian as their most preferred cuisine
Ø City with highest no. of unique users – New York City
Ø Top restaurants in NYC – Dos Caminos and Rosa Mexicano

I did a relative-preference mapping for all states under the study and ranked them as per their liking (relative to other cuisines) using color-coding. Darker the shade, higher the preference.

The states that are shaded light grey are not covered in this analysis.

Preference is a relative term. So, the term ‘top state’ for a cuisine indicates the state having maximum proportion of users for that cuisine compared to remaining 4 cuisines.

CChinese Food - Top state - Massachussets