Applied Data Science Capstone - Vermont Pizza Blogpost

Vermont is a state well known for its green mountains, ski resorts, colorful foliage, and landscapes.  It's also famous for its cheddar cheese, maple syrup, and Ben & Jerry's ice cream.  While its pizza is not as famous as New York or Chicago - there are many chain and local pizza restaurants in the major cities and towns.  I was born and raised in rural Vermont, moved to the Burlington area in 1996 and have lived in several of the largest cities/towns in the state since then.

The purpose of this project is to investigate the existing restaurants and other venues in Vermont - How many are there?  Where are they?  Is there one or a few general areas where businesses (specifically restaurants) seem to thrive?  Are the pizza restaurants evenly distributed?  Is there a heavily populated area where it appears a new pizza restaurant would succeed?

Let's start by looking at the cities and towns in Vermont

Not much we can determine from the first map... let's try again with markers that have a size relative to population

Burlington and its surrounding towns account for ~25% of the Vermont residents. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chittenden_County,_Vermont

POPULATION STATS (via United States Census Bureau 2017)
* Vermont                                                = 624,525
* Chittenden County                                = 162,372
* 1st Largest City = Burlington               = 42,239
* 1st Largest Town = Essex                     = 21,519
* 2nd Largest City = South Burlington    = 19,141
* 2nd Largest Town = Colchester            = 17,309

https://vtdigger.org/2019/05/30/woolf-population-growth-mostly-towns-within-50-miles-burlington/
It’s a well-known fact that Vermont’s population isn’t growing.
From 2010 to 2018 the state’s population grew by only 0.1%, just a fraction of the national rate of 5.8%.  More than half of all cities and towns in Vermont had fewer residents in 2018 than in 2010.
Chittenden County was the only county in the state where every town gained population.

Areas of population growth are ideal locations for opening a new business.
Let's use FourSquare to find all the pizza restaurants in Chittenden County

Now let's go back to the FourSquare data and collect all the Food and Drink venues in the area so we can do some clustering analysis

 Breaking the data down into 5 clusters - we see a couple cities that are similar to Burlington (Shelburne and Winooski)

City Cluster Map

Cluster Map with venue overlay

And now let's look at some statistics :
PizzaCount = # of pizza restaurants in the City
PopulationPerArea =  Population / Area (square miles)
PopulationPerPizza = Population / PizzaCount

- I did just a few minutes of research into the 3 Winooski pizza restaurants : Domino's Pizza, Pizza Putt, and Pizzeria Ida
  * Pizza Putt is actually closed permanently
  * Domino's Pizza (the well known chain) is delivery only
  * Pizzeria Ida is on the border with Burlington - not in the downtown Winooski area
This information is updated in the graph below
 
We are looking primarily for a HIGH PopulationPerPizza and less importantly a HIGH PopulationPerArea (dense population - more foot traffic) 
NOTE : Population and PizzaCount were adjusted to map in the 0-7000 range for easier comparison

For anyone who is interested in opening a pizza restaurant in Vermont - they should certainly look to the Burlington area - with 25% of the state population and all towns growing consistently.While they could look for real estate right in Burlington - I suspect it is the most expensive in the area and they would also face the most competition.  I would instead recommend looking at the surrounding towns.

Winooski and Shelburne have the most similar venues to Burlington (per our machine-learning cluster analysis).  Shelburne, however has a low population density while Winooski has the highest in the area.  Winooski also has the highest population per # of pizza restaurants after adjusting for the recently-closed and delivery-only-restaurant. 

So, in conclusion - I would recommend opening a new pizza restaurant in Winooski.