Food and Drink
78 posts
The impact of Covid-19 on the economy is sharp and sudden, which makes for some dramatic data visualization. I enjoy reading the set of charts showing consumer spending in different categories in the U.S., courtesy of Visual Capitalist. The designer did a nice job cleaning up the data and building a sequential story line. The spending are grouped by categories such as restaurants and travel, and then sub-categories such as...
My friend Ray Vella at The Conference Board has a few charts up on their coronavirus website. TCB is a trusted advisor and consultant to large businesses and thus is a good place to learn how the business community is thinking about this crisis. I particularly like the following chart: This puts the turmoil in the stock market in perspective. We are roughly tracking the decline of the Great Recession...
The Hustle wrote a strong analysis of the business of buffets. If you've read my analysis of Groupon's business model in Numbersense (link), you'll find some similarities. A key is to not think of every customer as an average customer; there are segments of customers who behave differently, and creating a proper mix of different types of customers is the management's challenge. I will make further comments on the statistics...
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about a challenger to the dominant weedkiller, Roundup, contains a nice selection of graphics. (Dicamba is the up-and-comer.) The change in usage of three brands of weedkillers is rendered as a small-multiples of choropleth maps. This graphic displays geographical and time changes simultaneously. The staircase chart shows weeds have become resistant to Roundup over time. This is considered a weakness in the...
Happy new year! Good luck and best wishes! *** We'll start 2020 with something lighter. On a recent flight, I saw a chart in The Economist that shows the proportion of operating income derived from overseas markets by major grocery chains - the headline said that some of these chains are withdrawing from international markets. The designer used one color for each grocery chain, and two shades within each color....
When making a scatter plot, the two variables should not be placed arbitrarily. There is a rule governing this: the outcome variable should be shown on the vertical axis (also called y-axis), and the explanatory variable on the horizontal (or x-) axis. This chart from the archives of the Economist has this reversed: The title of the accompanying article is "Ice Cream and IQ"... In a Trifecta Checkup (link), it's...
I have a longer article on the sister blog about the research design of a study claiming 420 "cannabis" Day caused more road accident fatalities (link). The blog also has a discussion of the graphics used to present the analysis, which I'm excerpting here for dataviz fans. The original chart looks like this: The question being asked is whether April 20 is a special day when viewed against the backdrop...
Saw this great little sign at Ippudo, the ramen shop, the other day: It's a great example of highly effective data visualization. The names on the board are sake brands. The menu (a version of a data table) is the conventional way of displaying this information. The Question Customers are selecting a sake. They don't have a favorite, or don't recognize many of these brands. They know a bit about...
At first glance, this graphic's message seems clear: what proportion of Americans are exceeding or lagging guidelines for consumption of different food groups. Blue for exceeding; orange for lagging. The stacked bars are lined up at the central divider - the point of meeting recommended volumes - to make it easy to compare relative proportions. The original chart is here, on the Health.gov website. The little icons illustrating the food...