After a long day of work, I wanted to just order some take away from one of the famous food delivery apps in UK. As a trained Level 2 Food Hygiene For Catering, I am determined to eat only from places with 4 or above when looking at scores on the door. To my disappointment only 2 places on the app that would deliver to my door had a food hygiene rating above 4.
Then an idea of research struck and that’s how this analysis came to live. I wanted to analyse what is the situation of restaurants across UK in terms of hygiene and if they are clustered in some sort around poorer richer areas. I was also interested to find out if a customer can “guestimate” the hygiene rating of a restaurant based on the other consumers’ ratings on Google, TripAdvisor, Zomato or the food delivery app that they use (Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats), which you definitely can not, it is really a hit or miss with a certain probability!
The data extraction took place on 15th August 2019 from the official Food Standards Agency (FSA) ‘UK food hygiene rating data API’ which details the overall food hygiene ratings of 609,164 units, rating components, and inspection results of food establishments across UK. The regions selected for analysis in this report are the same 12 regions as used by the FSA, and so businesses were split according to the region associated with their business. In Scotland “Improvement Required” was recoded as “0-3” and “Pass/ Pass and Eat Safe” as “4-5”. There were 383 local authorities data files that have been merged and data cleaning techniques have been applied: only establishments labelled as “Restaurants/ Cafes/ Canteens”, “Takeaways/ Sandwich Shops” and “Pubs/ Bars/ Nightclubs” were considered (289,926 units); if a business did not have a 0-5 rating then the entry was omitted (11,937 units). Customer review rating data was collected using web-scrapping tools on 16th August 2019. All later updates on all the ratings are not included in this analysis. Data mining and analysis was done using SPSS software and geo-mapping using QGIS.
The Royal Statistical Society International Conference International Conference gathers every year, over 600 statisticians and data scientists gather from all sectors and from over 30 countries to share information and network, and this year I participated with this poster and won the 3rd prize in the Poster Competition!
The entire design of the poster was created in-house from scratch with the idea in mind that you are sitting at a table and just about to tuck in some hopefully clean food!
If you are interested in collaborating in a similar research or you have a client who would benefit from Spatial Statistics Analysis or cool infographics/ data viz, please get in touch at [email protected].