The Influence of Environmental Factors on College Students’ Online Catering Ordering

Abstract

The catering O2O platform has greatly enriched people’s catering options, saving the cost of catering enterprises and consumers, and thus has achieved great development in recent years. The data provided by the O2O platform provides a good condition for us to study the impact of natural environmental factors on food and beverage consumption. With the help of ‘Eleme’ app, we collected the online catering data of about 30 restaurants around Zhongshan Vocational College, and established a multiple regression model for the online catering sales, then we used this model to study the impact of weather, wind, temperature, air pollution, and weekend/holiday on online catering orders. Our results showed that the online catering orders increased gradually with increase of the rainfall and the temperature. This is probably because the rainfall and high temperature increase the cost of people going out to eat, and thus increase the possibility of online ordering; air pollution and the increase in wind power did not significantly affect the online catering orders, which may be due to the fact that these two factors did not reach the level of serious impact on people’s activities during the study period. The weekend/holiday effect was very significant in this study, and people significantly increased the online ordering on weekends or holidays, probably because people were having rest. For the first time, our research uses O2O platform data to quantitatively study the impact of natural environmental factors on online catering sales, and our research provides an important management reference for online catering enterprises