Understanding access to restaurants through personas: A latent class approach integrating preferences and travel behavior

Introduction:

Access to food plays a key role in one’s health and well-being. Past studies on food access have primarily focused on grocery stores. Eating out, however, consumes on average 5.1% of Americans’ disposable income. Eating out is also a key activity that serves multiple purposes: social occasions, opportunity for networking and simply refueling and relaxation. Because eating out combines activity and travel, it is important to understand how individuals’ restaurant preferences and travel behavior may be bundled together to form different personas and how each persona may be related to the built environment and socioeconomic demographics.

Methods:

This study uses data from the Puget Sound Regional Council 2017–2019 Household Travel Survey to perform Latent Class Analysis (LCA). LCA can uncover similar subpopulations, allowing for separation of demographics and behavior during the clustering process.

Results:

The study finds four personas: Convenient Eaters, Lunch Breakers, Restaurant Explorers and Fast Food Enthusiasts. Restaurant-related travel behavior is significantly impacted by the number of children in a household, vehicle access and age, though it is not constrained for those who live in a “food desert”. Differences in travel time, frequency of restaurant trips and meal time are observed between personas.

Conclusions:

The findings of this study suggest that interventions toward healthy eating could be tailored to the specific needs of each persona. Personas display specific preferences toward cuisine and affordability in addition to travel-based motivations. For example, Convenient Eaters, who consume a moderate amount of fast food, could be encouraged to choose healthier options near their home, work, or other often-frequented locations. Fast Food Enthusiasts who solely eat out at fast food and are lower-income could be supported by both educational programs and government subsidies. Overall, the approach used in this study could be adopted for interventions to curate personalized recommendations for healthier eating and sustainable travel behaviors.