Introduction

Frozen pizza is a staple in many American households. It is a quick, easy to make meal that can satisfy a family. It is a popular item with many brands, so learning which people buy frozen pizzas, and when, can help answer a valueable question: How can household data and demographics be utilized to market and ultimately increase sales of frozen pizza? By answering this question, we can frozen pizza sales to increase vastly by optimizing marketing and campaigning stategies.

Libraries required:

library(tidyverse)
library(completejourney)
library(ggplot2)

Data Analysis

By analyzing how income affects the purchase of frozen pizzas by household composition, we learn that lower income households with single adults tend to purchase frozen pizzas most, likely due to the convenience and low cost of frozen pizzas. There is room for growth, however, in the lower-income demographics, so we suggest advertising the convenience and low cost of frozen pizzas to income ranges between 15-49K to grow that demographic, more specifically, single-parents. One interesting find was was that 1 adult households with kids do not purchase frozen pizza in the 50-74K range. We found this to be an untapped market, which should be pursued in promotions and other marketing.

By analyzing which age groups purchase the most frozen pizzas, it becomes clear that the 35-44 age group makes up the highest average purchase of frozen pizzas. This is likely due to the fact that this age group is most likely to be parents, so it makes sense that they would purchase the most frozen pizzas. The trailing two demographic groups are also likely to be parents, and the older demographic (55+) tends to avoid frozen pizza, likely due to a combination of taste and higher incomes. An opportunity to market more towards college students (19-24) reveals itself, since college students often need a quick and cheap meal, so we recommend targeting college students as a result of this data.

In analyzing the purchase of frozen pizza over time, and grouping by household composition, we discover when certain different families purchase frozen pizzas. According to the data, the second half of the year receives the most pizza sales. This coincides with a large number of holidays, and times when families are spending time together - when frozen pizzas’ convenience and low-cost can help busy families. Based on this, we believe that marketing towards families with kids, especially single-parent families would be a valuable strategy, since there is a greater potential of 1 adult families with kids to purchase frozen pizzas due to their convenience.

Summary

Frozen pizza, as with most frozen foods, is mainly purchased as a convenience item for cheap to be used as a filling meal when time does not allow for a full lunch/dinner. We expected college students to purchase majority of frozen pizzas, with a drop off after college, with a growth as people start families in their 30s. This was an incorrect assumption, however, and college-aged people did not purchase as much frozen pizza as we thought. We therefore suggest an increase in promotions for the age range 19-24 to tap into a market that could be lucrative, because college students are frequently looking for cheap and filling food options.

We found that certain demographics we expected to purchase frozen pizza did not. We expected the majority of frozen pizza buyers to be single-parent families looking for a quick meal when time was limited. Instead, we found that while frozen pizza was purchased by single-parent families, there were not as many sales as expected in the lower income range. Because of this, we suggest increasing promotions and marketing campaigns targeting single-parent households earning less than 100K per year.

We also expected more frozen pizza sales to occur during specific times of the year, however, this was not the case. The data seemed more “random,” but we did find that around August 20th and December 18th, an increase in sales occured. This was likely due to “back to school” and holiday discounts and promotions respectively. We found that an increase in promotions does in-fact lead to an increase in sales, so we recommend running more promotions at strategic times throughout the year (eg. summer, spring break, etc).