Food Trucks

in Downtown SLO

Ashley Lu, Taylor Driscoll, Connor King

March 11, 2016

Introduction

Agency Description/Background Existing businesses that want to expand by using food trucks on the streets will go through the San Luis Obispo Police Department. Having a food truck in a parking lot requires the business to go through the Planning Department. If the business is located within the city limits of San Luis Obispo, they can submit their application and fees to the Community Development Department.

Purpose Statement A surge of college-age people flood the bars and streets of downtown San Luis Obispo every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night starting around 10 p.m. Some just want to relax with friends; others test the limits of the law and their bodies. When they get to the point of exceeding their limits, assistance needs to be available. Eating food allows the person to slow down the immense amount of drinking and hopefully reverse the negative consequences that may derive from drinking more than the body can handle. Not only would allowing food trucks in downtown San Luis Obispo during these peak hours provide safety to students and the community, but it would profit local businesses as well. One of the most common laws broken downtown are public intoxication, with food trucks, people are less likely to wander around the streets looking for a ride, looking for food, etc.

Research Question(s) Qualitative

1. How many nights out of the week do you go to the bars in Downtown SLO? 2. Are you satisfied with the food availability between 10PM to 2AM downtown? 3. If you were to leave a bar after midnight, how likely are you to purchase food? 4. Would you be more likely to purchase food if there were more options readily

available/closer to the bars between the hours of 10PM and 2AM? 5. The vast majority of restaurants in downtown SLO stop serving food at 10PM.

Would you be interested in having the option to purchase food while downtown at the bars during the weekends from 10PM-2AM?

6. How old are you? 7. What do you identify yourself as? 8. Do you eat before drinking? 9. How often do you eat after consuming alcohol? 10. How do you get home from downtown? 11. What kind of food do you enjoy the most after consuming alcohol? 12. How close do you live to downtown?

13. How much would you be willing to pay for a late night meal downtown between 10PM and 2AM?

Quantitative

1. Tell me about your experiences from the last time you were at the bars downtown in SLO.

1. How would you feel if there were food trucks provided in downtown SLO during peak, late night hours near the bars?

2. If there were food trucks Downtown SLO, would you spend money on their food? Why or why not?

3. What do you believe the primary cause for alcohol poisoning is among students downtown?

4. How much money do you typically spend on food when eating in Downtown SLO?

5. What reasons do you think food trucks Downtown SLO late at night, near the bars, would be beneficial?

6. Tell me about your experiences finding food after leaving the bars at night. 7. Have you experienced purchasing food from a food truck before? If so, tell me

about the experience you had eating at a food truck. 8. How do you typically get home from the bars? 9. Do you like to go to different bars throughout the night or are you more likely to

stay at one or two the entire night?

Methods

Subjects and Sampling Method The population that this survey pertains to is everyone who attends the bars in downtown SLO. This includes all genders and ages. All people in the population are over the age of 21. A large subset of this population is Cal Poly students. The survey is targeted to those individuals aged 21+ who go downtown to the bars during peak late night hours. The research team used convenience sampling in order to conduct our research. They will be choosing respondents that are close to them in relationship, and who also possess the characteristics of going downtown during late night hours and going to the bars.

Issues in data collection and Sample vs. Population At first, the researchers came across the issue of only getting a vast majority of female respondents. They saw this was a problem because it wouldn’t have given us an accurate representation sample of our population. However, by providing the survey to a wider audience, the research team received a vast majority of male respondents,

which evened out the percentages of female and male respondents. From the end results, the sample did not differ from the general population by much, if at all.

Quantitative Data gathering

Method and Development The research team used a survey to conduct quantitative research. This was most appropriate since research involved using convenience sampling. The data can be collected and analyzed fairly quickly. The results from the sample can be generalized to the entire population if the response rate is high enough. Luckily, the response rate from the survey was very high. They developed questions that pertained to the target market’s experience & behaviors, attitudes/values/opinions, feelings, knowledge/skills, and demographics. They were able to pilot the survey to a few students in our RPTA 360 class and made a few changes before sending out the survey to a greater population.

Details about Data Collection Our data came entirely through digital collection. One method was posting the survey onto private sorority pages of our members and requesting that it be filled out. This resulted in great numbers, however, it gave us only female responses. The research team then posted the survey to the Cal Poly class of 2017 home page on Facebook and requested specifically men, but encouraged anyone who attends the bars. This resulted in overwhelming responses and balanced out our male to female ratio very nicely. The survey collected so many responses in fact that people were getting cut off due to the fact that they had to shut down access to the survey in order to analyze it.

Qualitative Data

Method Semi-structured interviews were chosen as the best method of evaluation. This method is the most appropriate because having a structured outline allows the research team to get all the necessary information, while also giving them the freedom to follow up on specific areas of interest. In addition, the research team believed that that a conversational tone is the most effective in terms of gathering information from the interviewee. This survey was piloted twice through the RPTA 360 class and some of the questions were very repetitive so the research team took out those questions or reworded them.

Sample Since the research team decided to use convenience sampling as their primary way of retrieving information, researchers recruited participants that were familiar with. This will allow the respondents and interviewers to feel more comfortable during the interview process, which allowed for more accurate and honest responses. They also looked for people who have/had a lot of experiences going downtown to the bars and those who felt comfortable about giving their honest answers.

Interviews Conducted Interviews were conducted from the week of February 29th to March 4th. The team interviewed six people for an hour each at coffee shops, the library, or a house. In addition, there were three 15-minute individual interviews. The interviewers began the interview by getting to know the interviewee and make them more comfortable. It is vital that the interviewee feels comfortable so they give honest and valuable responses. There was no formal guide for the interview. The interviewer would simply go off of the questions the team had formulated and create conversation from them.

Results

Quantitative Data was analyzed through excel. The research team found averages, standard deviations, created pivot tables, bar graphs, and much more. Some key questions to look at involved gender, satisfaction, and the need for the availability of food downtown SLO on the weekends at late hours. They chose to look at these questions in order to understand what the target market has and what they want. It is important to look at gender to ensure that there will be a large enough target market as all genders were interested in the proposal.

The research team barely had issues with data collector or analysis mainly because they had used a convenience sampling. After 68 responses, only 18% of the responses came from males. Two of the team members had sent the survey to their sororities, which made the ratio of males to females so drastic. This was not an accurate representation of the population so the research team made efforts to get more males to complete the survey. By reaching out to the broader Cal Poly students and targeting males, they obtained a sample size of 182 responses with 40.66% males.

Based on the positive results, it would be beneficial to San Luis Obispo if food trucks were to be permitted Downtown SLO between 10PM and 2AM from Thursday through Saturday. Several important findings support this idea.

First, the question, “If you were to leave a bar after midnight, how likely are you to purchase food?” was responded on a (not likely) 1 → 5 (very likely) likert scale. The

average response was a 3.64 with a standard deviation of .71. This is a relatively small standard deviation as 68% of the sample was between 2.93 and 4.35. This shows that this sample is very interested in purchasing food after they leave a bar after midnight.

Next, for the question “Would you be more likely to purchase food if there were more options readily available/closer to the bars between the hours of 10PM and 2AM, 164 students out of the 182 responses states that they would either 4, be very likely, or 5, be extremely likely, to do so.

The table below counts how many times respondents went out in a given week. The majority of respondents said they went out twice a week. Only ten responded that they went out zero times. In response to the second table, 172/182 respondents stated that they went downtown to the bars in SLO at least once a week. This demonstrates that there is a good market for food trucks in downtown SLO since all of these respondents are part of the target market as they are 21 and older and visit the bars.

The graph below is the satisfaction with food availability in downtown SLO between the hours of 10PM and 2AM for males and females. The average satisfaction for all genders was a 1.81 with a standard deviation of 1.41. Data table number 3 demonstrates that males, females, and a transgender are dissatisfied with the food availability late night downtown on the weekends. There were almost twice as many females who stated they were a 1 on the scale of 5, however there are more females in our sample. Out of the 187 respondents, no one picked a 4 and only 4 people picked a 5, demonstrating that students are not satisfied with their options during these peak hours.

Gender and Satisfaction with Food Availability between 10PM and 2AM downtown

Below is a correlation matrix. The only correlation that seems fairly strong is a positive correlation of 0.60 between “Would you be interested in having the option purchase food?” and “Would you be more likely to purchase food if there were more options readily available. Closer to the bars between the hours of 10pm-2am?”. This means that the more interested an individual is in having the option to purchase food downtown, the more they’ll be willing to purchase food that was closer to buy food downtown. On the other hand, age didn’t have any strong correlations with any of the questions asked.

Qualitative

The research team analyzed the data from the interviews by looking back at their notes and determining key themes.

Major themes

Open Codes (all) Axial Codes (themes, categories)

Difficulty finding sober driver Convenience and accessibility

Want Quality of Life

Uber Means of getting home

Hungry Satisfying Needs

Taco Bell Satisfying Needs

Friends Maintaining Relationships

Social Social Norms

Home Convenience and accessibility

Convenience Cherishing time and accessibility

Lack of Food Satisfying Needs

While collecting data, the research team put the survey on the Cal Poly SLO Class of 2017 Facebook wall. Below is a screenshot of the interest and responses students shared. By the amount of responses the survey gathered after the research team had posted this on the wall demonstrates student’s interest in food trucks being available.

Conclusions & Recommendations

The purpose of this survey was to collect and analyze data to determine the market for the possible implementation of food trucks in downtown SLO from Thursday through Saturday from 10PM to 2AM. The research team observed a surge of college-aged people flood the bars and streets of downtown San Luis Obispo every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The research team thought that not only would allowing food trucks in downtown San Luis Obispo during these peak hours provide safety to students and the community, but would profit local businesses as well.

Infer from Data From the data one can infer that there is a want and need for food to be more available and convenient during the peak hours downtown on the weekends in SLO. There are only a few places in SLO that are open past 10pm and there is clearly a need for more options.

Action Steps The city of San Luis Obispo should allow food trucks to be in the downtown area near bars between the hours of 10pm and 2am during the weekends. Current businesses in SLO should obtain permits through the city.

Limitations

Evaluations and research results can be limited or impacted by external or uncontrollable circumstances.

Impacted Data When the surveys were first sent out, it reached a lot of female audiences, therefore, a vast majority of our respondents were females. It was hard getting the percent of males to match up with the number of females who already responded. However, they gathered a lot of male respondents from posting on a larger social media platform. This impacted our data collection because it wasn’t representative of our target population. There needed a more representative group of our target market in order to generalize our results to the greater population. Because of this, they had to frantically post the survey onto a more representative platform and hope that respondents of all genders would take the time to complete it.

Avoided in Future This can be avoided in the future by posting our survey to several different platforms at the start of our research process. Therefore, there will be a lot of traffic coming into our survey from a variety of people at random. Since our main problem was initially posting on page that only consisted of girls, the research team now knows that if they were going to do that, they need to also either post the survey to a page consisting of all males or solely post on a page with all genders.

Summary

This evaluation has reached a conclusion that there is in fact a large demand for food trucks downtown during peak drinking hours. The current dilemma facing college students and other bar goers is the lack of accessibility to food late at night. Not only is this an inconvenience, it is a safety concern. Eating food before, during and after drinking significantly reduces the risk of irrational behavior and/or alcohol poisoning. In addition to the safety factors, the city of San Luis Obispo and local business owners are missing out big on a fantastic business opportunity. As mentioned before, the demand is there! Although there are hoops and ladders, which must be jumped through in order to permit commercial food trucks on city streets at night, it is worthwhile.

We believe that if we had not only used convenience sampling as our method of data collection, we would have acquired a much more useful and insightful guide to the potential of the implementation of food trucks. We could have reached out to older bar goers, local business owners and city officials to really obtain insight from all stakeholders involved. As mentioned above, I would expand our sample size. For business owners and city officials I believe a face-to-face interview would be the most beneficial. In this case it would be important to tailor the questions specifically to him or her rather than asking the same questions that students received.

Appendix

Thank you for taking the time to complete our survey. First, we want to clarify that you are over the age of 21 and attend bars in Downtown SLO. Our intention is to bring food trucks to downtown SLO during peak, late night hours during the weekend. Your input and responses will allow us to evaluate the market for food trucks. Most food establishments downtown close around 9, leaving night goers without many food options. We would love to hear your opinion on this topic and discuss your experience and opinions.

1. Tell me about your experiences from the last time you were at the bars downtown in SLO.

2. How would you feel if there were food trucks provided in downtown SLO during peak, late night hours near the bars?

3. If there were food trucks Downtown SLO, would you spend money on their food? Why or why not?

4. What do you believe the primary cause for alcohol poisoning is among students downtown?

5. How much money do you typically spend on food when eating in Downtown SLO?

6. What reasons do you think food trucks Downtown SLO late at night, near the bars, would be beneficial?

7. Tell me about your experiences finding food after leaving the bars at night. 8. Have you experienced purchasing food from a food truck before? If so, tell me

about the experience you had eating at a food truck. 9. How do you typically get home from the bars? 10. Do you like to go to different bars throughout the night or are you more likely to

stay at one or two the entire night?