Introduction

Whenever I wanted to go out to eat, I always wondered: "What restaurant can I get the most food while spending the least amount of money?" and "Which restaurant has the healthiest options?" Being a starving college student, getting the most value out of my dollar is important to me, and knowing where I can go to get the most food for the least amount of money will help narrow down where I want to eat. It will also influence other people's decisions if they are on a budget.

Criteria

No combo deals because there would be too many combinations to analyze, we would have needed to account for every kind of drink, side, and size combination. We collected data on 500 items, if we were to also include combo deals we would have well over 5000 individual items.

No all-you-can-eat places, so no Panda Express or Subway. Following the first reason, there are too many combinations to analyze and there isn't a way to account for portion control.

The item must only be a proportion for one person to eat, and it must also be an item from a restaurant in California. Since prices differ from state to state, we only looked at California prices, so we could compare rates equally.

Restaurants

We collected data from 17 different fast food restaurants that met all of the criteria.

Data Collection

For each item in each restaurant, we collected data for each of these variables. The variables that are underlined are the ones we focused on in our analysis.

Our method for collecting data was to convert the pdf of nutritional facts into csv files, so they could be read into R-studio. We kept all of the nutrition facts for each restaurant organized in a Google Excel sheet. Then, converted the data using Notepad and SAS Studio to separate the text by commas.

Results

Analysis

Winners

Raising Cane's was the healiest option having the least amount of saturated fat. They also had the second lowest amount of sodium and second highest amount of dietry fiber.

In-n-out had the best overall calorie to price ratio. Furthermore they were one of the healthier options with the least amount of sodium and the fourth most dietary fiber

Taco Bell had the best calorie to price item (second overall) and was also on the healtheir side with the 4th least sodium and the most dietry fiber.

As you may have noticed there is a trend between these three resturants. Overall they are all lacking in protien compared to other choices, which may explain why they're healtheir and cheaper

Losers

Blimie has the worst overall deals and the most amount of sodium out of any other restaurant

Chick-fil-A had one of the worst calorie-to-price ratios and the second-most overall sodium level

Buffalo Wild Wings finished second to last in calorie to price and didn't have good health benefits

Again there is a similar trend with the losers, except this time, they are high in protein but are more expensive with greater health risks

Correlation Table

Looking at this correlation table we noticed price is most positively correlated to protein and calories. But is more correlated with protein over calories.

Final Thoughts

Raising Cane's is the healthiest option for a fast-food restaurant

Taco Bell has the best bang for your buck having five items in the top ten calorie-to-price ratio

In-n-Out is the best of both worlds with affordable prices and relatively healthy food

Our biggest takeaway from this project is that protein is expensive and impacts the price of food the most. So if you require meat for your meals then you're going to have to be willing to pay extra.

Git Hub

All of our code can be found under sdswcode2.Rmd: 

https://github.com/alainaliu/sdsw-project

This includes a shiny program my partner created (sdswcodeshiny.Rmd), which lets you interact with our graphs and tables from our project.

 

This project is posted on the UCSB DSCollab website:
https://dscollab.github.io/Pages/projects2223.html