The nature and evolution of online food preferences

Food is a central element of humans’ life, and food preferences are amongst others manifestations of social, cultural and economic forces that influence the way we view, prepare and consume food. Historically, data for studies of food preferences stems from consumer panels which continuously capture food consumption and preference patterns from individuals and households. In this work we look at a new source of data, i.e., server log data from a large recipe platform on the World Wide Web, and explore its usefulness for understanding online food preferences. The main findings of this work are: (i) recipe preferences are partly driven by ingredients, (ii) recipe preference distributions exhibit more regional differences than ingredient preference distributions, and (iii) weekday preferences are clearly distinct from weekend preferences.