You’ll Never Guess the Cleanest Fast Food Joint in NYC

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Quantitative Analysis of NYC Open Data: Every data set that the city releases tells a story. This blog is all about telling those stories, one data set at a time.

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October 1, 2014

While walking around NYC, I invariable pass fast food restaurants in many neighborhoods. It’s inevitable. And when it comes to fast food, different people have varying reactions to these establishments. Some are fans, others stay far away.

One curiosity that is common in NYC is the fast food chain combination. KFC and Taco Bell’s embed themselves together often. Burger King and Popeyes have been known to shack up together as well. And of course Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robins can be found swirled as one.

Over my years here, I’ve met more than my fair share of people who were turned off by these combination restaurants and that got me wondering if they are somehow subpar to their single counterparts.

One interesting way to measure the differences here is through the eyes of the City’s health inspectors. Although I’ve showed that the system has some unintended subjectivity associated with it, (that notably, DOH has refused to acknowledge), the numbers still give us a meaningful estimate of health code violations.

When a restaurant is inspected, violation points are given out. Getting 13 or less leads to an A grade, while 14-27 leads to a B. 28 or higher is a C.

So if combination chains are somehow less clean or have more violations than the numbers should show it, right? Luckily, thanks to Open Data, we can see for ourselves.

Now to the numbers:

The chart shows that the 5 most common combinations each have worse inspection results on average than their single counterparts. For example, Taco Bell has an average inspection score of a respectable 11.8, giving it an A average. KFC has a 14.7, given it a high B average. But the KFC/Taco Bells come in at a whopping 28.5 average, higher than the sum of the solo chains and putting them into C territory on average! A similar bump is seen in Papa John’s/Subway combinations, and smaller bumps can be found in other combos in the chart.

Putting combinations aside, it’s also interesting to see which chains in NYC have the best and worst inspection scores.

The verdict surprised me:

According to NYC health inspectors, the chain with the least health violations on average is White Castle! Taco Bell comes in second and Starbucks comes in a respectable third. At the rear, we have Domino’s, Papa John’s and then IHOP by a wide margin.

As always, there are a few caveats. Different types of food preparation may lead to different numbers of violations, and IHOP has the most varied menu of all the options above. The same could be true for combo-chains: more food options means more things can go wrong. But thousands of restaurants across New York City are able to maintain an A score, and I guarantee that they all have more complicated menus than any of these chains. It’s also important to remember that these values are Averages, and so they can be swayed by outliers. Lastly, health inspection scores are obviously just one of many measures of restaurants.

So the take away? If you must get your fast food fix, try and order that combo at a non-combo. And thankfully, the next time your drunk friends question your recommendation of White Castle at 2AM, you can back your decision up with data. Never a bad thing.

Health Inspection Data can be found here.
Analysis Done with Pandas in Beaker Notebook.
Plots made in Excel.

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(Notes: 67)