Thanksgiving 2021 Special Edition

This data was originally featured in the November 24, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/11/inbox-insights-november-24-2021-the-thanksgiving-2021-special-edition/

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s have a bit of fun for the Thanksgiving holiday. One of the data sources that’s interesting to work with for getting practice doing data science tasks is the Open Food Facts database, a user-generated database of food and nutrition data from around the world. For fun, I selected all the products with turkey in the name, and then extracted the more than 4,500 products and their product data.

First, let’s talk overall nutrition. Turkey products are unsurprisingly relatively high in energy density – calories – since they’re mostly protein:

What I find interesting is that per 100 grams, there’s typically much more sugar than salt in turkey products, and only fresh turkey is unlikely to have added sugar and salt. If you’re on a restricted meal plan, fresh from the farmer is probably a safe bet.

Now, for a more marketing-focused application, what are the words most commonly used in turkey products? Let’s see:

What we make of this, besides the obvious (I would be concerned if a turkey product didn’t have turkey in the name of the product) is that the attributes of the turkey top the list – smoked, oven-roasted, with honey, etc. An exercise like this is useful when you’re doing product naming to determine how unique your product’s name may or may not be. Additionally, if you’re doing keyword research for SEO, a starting list of existing product names may be a great way to quickly build an understanding of the landscape.

Competitive analysis and landscape analysis of products is getting easier and easier with more product databases being built and opened up to the public; as marketers, we must make use of these data sources in our own work.

Happy turkey!

Methodology: Trust Insights used the Open Food Facts database to identify 4,543 products with turkey in the name, then filtered to products with an origin in the United States of America. Ice cream made by the Turkey Hill corporation was excluded. The date of study is November 24, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.