Finding the best location: Fast food

chain’s 1st restaurant in Toronto,

Canada

GASTON SLUPSKI
FEBRUARY 2019
Introduction
Background

Let’s assume that a fast food chain called “Wenzy’s” (yeah, it’s similar to Wendy’s, but different owners) is
coming to town, here in Toronto, Canada. The management is wondering where they should open their first
restaurant. They need a place that will generate fast profits, without worrying about their marketing costs in
advertising and retention so much.

Project’s question: What is the best location to open the first “Wenzy’s”?

For this, we need to understand these 3 different requirements, where the location:

✓ Has a high-dense population, preferably surrounded by offices and stores

✓ Has a high percentage of restaurants (meaning people usually go to eat in this location)
✓ Doesn’t have a high level of competition with other fast food chains

Data collection
Data sources

 A list of neighborhoods from Toronto, Canada; taken from a Wikipedia article

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_of_Canada:_M)
 A list of geospatial coordinates (latitude, longitude) for each neighborhood in Toronto, Canada; taken from
the Cognitive Class’ website (http://cocl.us/Geospatial_data)
 Data on all the main venues of Toronto, Canada; taken from a Foursquare’s API
(https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/explore?&client_id={}&client_secret={}&v={}&ll={},{}&radius={}&limit={
})

Data cleaning
1. It was parsed through the Wikipedia article, to retrieve the relevant list of neighborhoods from Toronto,
Canada.
2. Once the article was parsed, the data was arranged in a table with 3 different columns: 'PostalCode',
'Borough', 'Neighborhood’.
3. Afterwards, the Cognitive Class’ list on coordinates was downloaded (in csv format). Moreover, the
coordinates (columns: ‘Latitude’ and ‘Longitude’) where added to the previous neighborhoods’ list.
4. After this, it was downloaded from the Foursquare’s API a list of 100 venues of Toronto, Canada, and
merged into the previous neighborhoods’ list, matching every venue within their relevant neighborhood.
Exploratory Data Analysis
First, having a size of 2251 rows and 7 columns within our database, it was
proceeded to count the number of venues per neighborhood. Once this was
displayed, we count the unique number of venues’ categories in the dataset;
having 279 unique categories.
Moreover, it was created a map of the neighborhoods in Toronto, Canada using
this dataset.
Modelling: clusters
For the modelling section, it was used a clustering in order to differentiate different
clusters where neighborhoods in Toronto, Canada, are similar with different
parameters. There were defined 10 clusters in the model and labeled each cluster
(from 0 to 9).
Moreover, it was created a new dataset with the original final version of the
dataset (see Table 1) and added the top 10 most frequented venues’ categories
and the relevant cluster label for each neighborhood.
Findings
Once the clusters were set on the new dataset, it was created a new map of the neighborhoods
in Toronto, Canada, distributed by the different clusters (marked in different colors).

With this new map, it was analyzed each cluster composed by their relevant venues’
categories. We could identify each cluster has a different trait of venues that were
related to specific environments.
Conclusions
Once we had all the clusters analyzed, we can conclude that the 1st restaurant
“Wenzy’s” in Toronto should have a location in any of the neighborhoods within
cluster 1.
Cluster 1 can be classified as:
1. Neighborhoods that offer a variety of shops and offices, having a high dense-
population within them.
2. Neighborhoods with multiple restaurants representing an opportunity to
distinguish the brand of “Wenzy’s” with usual commensals in the area.
3. Neighborhoods without a high percentage of fast food restaurants, meaning a
low competition in the area.