Food Industry Analysis Paper - Essay Example

This is not so with the food industry because it is a basic physical need. It may be that some luxury foods are done away with during times of economic crisis, but the food industry as a whole can be rest assured that it will be around for a long time to come. As the population of this country grows, so will the number of mouths that are needed to be fed. This ensures that should increase year-on-year for a long time to come. The purpose of this paper is to look at the strengths of the various categories of the food industry and determine how an increase in sales is reflected by increases in employment numbers, employee wages, and the number of restaurants.

Because this is such a large industry and covers tens of millions of people, I will focus specifically on New York City. The reason why I chose this place was because the city is famous for always being on the move. The diversity in the city means that there are many ethnic food restaurants available for customers to eat at. My hypothesis is that as the sales of the food industry are increasing, so must employment numbers, employee wages, and the number of restaurants. For an industry that seems to be booming, it would make sense to reinvest profits back into the industry itself, thereby ensuring its success over the short and long term.

The types of data that will be used in this paper are primary sources, such as the New York State Department of Labor and ReferenceUSA. To clarify what food restaurants will be taken into consideration, the NAICS code that will be looking at is 722211 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). This code specifically entails establishments that provide food services where the customer chooses his meal and pays for it before receiving it. To be clear, snack and non-alcoholic beverage bars will not be included in this analysis.

The dependent variable in this paper will be the sales numbers for the food industry as a whole. It is very easy to locate these figures because they are complied by the relevant departments each year for public knowledge. The scatter plot below shows the sales numbers in the food industry over the last few years: As can be seen from the graph, the food industry as a whole is growing year-on-year. Of course, the figure for 2012 is just an estimate since we don’t have those figures available yet.

In fact, in the last couple of years, the slope has gotten steeper, which suggests that the pace of the food industry will not slow down anytime soon. On average, the food industry’s sales are increasing by $22.13 billion each year or around 3 to 4%. From this, we can say that the outlook for the food industry is positive unless some unforeseen disaster occurs. The slope for this graph is y = 22.13x + 167.26, based on a base year of 1990. Looking ahead to 2020, we can make a prediction of the sales of the food industry with this equation.

The equation would be as follows: y = 22.13 (30) + 167.26 = $831.16 billion each year. Of course, the growth rate may change based on external factors that are outside of the food industry’s control. However, this figure gives a pretty good estimate of where the food industry will be by the end of this decade and shows that everything is looking positive. Now that we have shown that the sales for the food industry will continue to grow for some time yet, we need to see what is fueling that helping to fuel that growth.

This paper will look at three independent variables: employee numbers, employee wages, and number of restaurants. For employee numbers, New York City can