Katie Torpey and Steph Westerman conducted a survey to gather information about people's food preferences and cooking habits in order to design recipe cards. They asked respondents questions about demographics, dietary preferences, favorite foods, cooking responsibilities, and more. The survey was created using Survey Monkey and distributed online and through social media to collect 100 responses. Key findings included that over half of respondents were carnivores, mothers did most of the household cooking, and popular favorite foods included pasta, curry, chocolate cake, and cheesecake. When filtering for just vegetarians and vegans, the survey found that these groups favored foods like quorn steak, toffee fudge cake, and cooking primarily for 1-
2. Why did we do research?
The purpose of our research was to find out whether people where vegetarian or not.
We created this survey for people to fill out so that we knew what kinds of things people like that we could do to go on our recipe
cards.
To do this we asked a series of questions for the public.
The questions we asked are:
-How old are you?
-What is your gender?
-What are you? (Vegan/Vegetarian/Carnivore).
-Who does the household cooking?
-What is your favourite savoury meal?
-What is your favourite dessert?
-How many people do you cook for?
-Do you enjoy eating organic foods?
-Which countries food do you prefer?
-What food do you eat the most?
This helped us to get all the information we needed which would be helpful to us and to help us create a good recipe card.
All the questions helped us in different ways, but here is some reasons as to why the questions helped us:
‘How old are you’ and ‘What is your gender’ is a important question because we needed to know who filled in the survey more and
medium age group.
‘What are you’ is also a useful question for us because it helped us to find out which category people fall in to and how many
people are vegetarian over vegan’s and carnivores. This will help us to get a rough idea of the kind of people we will be targeting
to make our cards for.
‘Who does the household cooking’ and ‘How many people do you cook for’ is a useful question because to be able to make our
cards we need to make it apt to the person that is cooking and we will also need to make sure that the food serves the right
amount of people.
‘What is your favourite savoury meal’ and ‘What is your favourite dessert’ helped us to find out what kinds of food different people
preferred and it will also help us to include some of the food’s that they specified.
‘Do you enjoy eating organic foods’ isn’t as important as the other questions but still is at the same time in its own way.
This helped us to find different peoples opinion on food ethics.
‘What countries food do you prefer’ will help us to include different styles of food so that its something different and exciting for
people to eat. This will also help us to make our card look more interesting as we can have different themed cards.
3. How was the research carried out?
As we had to find out as much data as possible my team decided to use a method that would be a quick, simple easy way to collect
data from the target audience. We firstly decided to come up with 10 important questions that we wanted to find out about our
target audience. These questions ranged from the gender to the age and also if they was vegetarian or carnivore. We signed up to a
website called survey monkey. Using this website gave us the opportunity to create a questionnaire including 10 questions. We
decided to create a few closed optional questions and a few open questions. This gave us chance to get a wide variety of different
opinions, interests and data.
We decided to use survey monkey on the internet as a source of questions it was very easy and simple to use. We was able to put a
range of different questions that would help us find out relevant information. The advantages of using survey monkey is that the
survey is free and we was allowed up to 100 responses that we could view back. This gave us more than enough data that we can
evaluate and compare. Another advantage of using survey monkey is that it was a very good way to get response. We could email,
text, tell people the link of the survey and they was able to click straight onto the website and then answer the survey. This meant
that it saved a lot of time as people didn’t have to fill out paper questionnaires. Another advantage is that survey monkey calculates
up the results of the questionnaire and this means that we are able to compare and contrast the range of different answers. A
disadvantage to using survey monkey was that there is a 10-question limit this meant that we was only allowed to put 10 questions
on the survey which meant that we was restricted. Another disadvantage to using survey monkey is that is didn’t allow us to use a
range of different age groups.
As we needed as many responses as possible I decided to broadcast and advertise the url for the survey on social networking sites.
These included facebook, twitter and tumblr. This was a useful way to get results as it meant that more people will see it however
the disadvantage is that most of the people may not be vegetarian as that is was we was trying to find out. Using vegetarian forums
meant that we could publish our survey URL to the target audience which was vegetarians. This was helpful as it meant that we got
relevant responses that we needed. Friends and family was also another source of data where there was a chance to collect
information using different age categories.
5. Question 1 – How old are you?
This question was asked so that we knew
who was filling out the questionnaire. It was
also been filled out so that we had a rough
idea of who we would be doing the cards for.
Here is a table showing the results.
56% of the people that filled in the survey
where 16-20.
The second group of people that filled in the
survey where ages 5-15 at 14%.
Coming in close at third was 31-30 year olds
with 12%.
21-30 with 8%.
41-50 at 7%.
no 60+.
This showed us that the most people that
filled in the survey where 16-20.
6. Question 2 – What is your gender?
This question was asked so that we
knew who was filling out the
questionnaire, but again so that we
knew who we would most likely be
making the cards for.
Here is a table of other results that we
gained.
58% came in at Female.
40% Male.
2% Preferred not to say.
This showed us that over half of the
people that filled in the survey where
women.
7. Question 3 – What are you?
This question was asked so that we knew
how many vegetarians, vegans and
carnivores there are. This gave us a better
idea of what kinds of card we would be doing
and who for.
Here’s a list of the different food types
different people are.
Coming first is Carnivore at 55%.
Vegetarian came second with 20%.
Other was third at 18%.
and coming last was vegan at 7%.
This showed us that more than half of the
people that did the survey where carnivore.
This showed us what percentage there where
of Carnivores, Vegan, Vegetarian and other.
8. Question 4 – Who does the most cooking in your household?
This question was asked so that we knew
who did the cooking in the household so
that we knew who to do the cards for, for
example, the style.
Here is a table of who does the most
cooking in the household.
Mum came in at 62%.
Other 21%.
Dad with 14%.
Finally children at 3%.
This showed us that the person who does
the most cooking in the household was the
mother. This means that we would have to
make the card so that it was apt to the
female gender or more so than men.
9. Question 5 – What is your favourite savoury meal?
25
This question showed us what meals
20 where peoples favourites, these are
the top 3 people mentioned,
Steak and Chips, Curry, and Pasta.
15
These are some food types that we
could include on our cards.
10 This is also giving us variety as Steak
and Chips is English, Curry is Indian
and Pasta is Italian.
5
15 people decided that steak was
their favourite dish, chips was second
0 with a response of 10 people choosing
it. 13 people chose that curry was
Steak Chips Curry Pasta their favourite dish and pasta was the
most popular with 20 people voting
for it .
10. Question 6 – What is your favourite dessert?
• As question 6 was an open question there was a range of
different answers to choose from I decided to pick the
top 4 answers for desserts.
40 • These questions included chocolate cake, cheesecake, ice
35 cream and yoghurt. As these was the top 4 answers I
30 decided to find out how many people answered these.
25
20
15 • I found out that 35 people chose chocolate cake was
10 their favourite dessert. 26 people decided that
5 cheesecake was there favourite dessert. Ice cream was
0 chosen by 23 people and yoghurt was the least wanted
dessert which was voted by 15 people.
• From these results I can see which people like the
desserts.
11. Question 7– How many people do you cook for?
• This question allowed us to see how big the recipes
should be as it asked the question how many people for
you cook for.
• 97 people out of 100 answered this question. 3 people
skipped it.
• The results are shown as 27% of the people cook for 1
person, 15% of the audience cook for 2 people, 29% of
the people which answered this survey answered it that
they cook for people, 17% of the audience cook for 4
people and the rest of the people who answered this
survey cooked for and over.
• Using these results I can identify how big my dish will be
and if it will suit my target audience.
12. Question 8– Do you enjoy eating organic foods?
• This question in the survey was created to ask people if
they enjoyed eating organic foods.
• The results show that most people ‘sometimes’ enjoy
eating organic foods wit 56% of the votes.
• 31% of the people answered yes that they do enjoy
eating organic food and the rest of the audience
answered with no which was 13%.
• These results show that most people enjoy eating organic
food rather than not. This means I can plan to identify
different types of organic food to include in the recipes.
13. Question 9 – Which countries food do you prefer?
• This question allows the audience to chose what type of
food they prefer out of
Italian, American, Spanish, Chinese, Indian, French and
English there is also an option for another type of food.
• These results are very varied and the top 3 answers
include Italian which was 31%. Indian was also the
second favourite dish with 14%., and the 3rd favourite
dish was English food with 26%.
• From these results I can work out recipes which will most
interest my target audience for example I could use pizza
for the Italian theme.
14. Question 10 – What food do you eat the most?
• From these questions I can find out what my audience
eats the most so I could include this when decided what
products to make in my recipes cards.
• From this questionnaire I can see that most of my
audience eats meat. With 62% eating meat the most
proves that most of my audience is carnivores.
• 19% of the audience eats vegetables and also fruit is
eaten by 11% of the audience these are more likely to be
vegetarians.
16. Question 1 – How old are you?
The most common age group that are
vegetarian and vegan is 16-20 year olds at
42.11%.
5-15 year olds came second with 18.42%.
21-30 came at 10.53%.
31-40 at 10.53%.
41-50 at 10.53%.
And finally 60+ with 0%.
We have a wide range of vegetarians that
are 16-20 years old because we published
our survey on face book and twitter and
other social networking sites. Our
connections and friends are in this range
group and this is why the results are more
likely to 16-20 year olds.
17. Question 2 – What is your gender?
This graph shows that there are
more Female vegetarians and
vegans than males.
16 Females filled this in and came
in at 59%
9 Males filled this survey in and it
came in at 33%.
2 people said that they preferred
not to say and this was 7%.
There was a greater percentage of
females to males because more
females knew about the survey as
most of our friends was females
instead of males. Also I think males
are less likely to fill in the survey.
18. Question 3 – What are you?
As we filtered our results so that only
vegetarian and vegan response was
shown. This question shows that there
was 20 people answered this said they
was vegetarian and 7 people answered
said that they was vegans.
74% of people that filled in this where
vegetarian.
25% of people was vegans
Filtering our results allows us to focus on
the target audience and find out more
about what vegetarians like to eat and
what they are interested in.
19. Question 4 – Who does the most cooking in your household?
Here is a table of who does the household
cooking.
65.79% said their mum does the cooking.
18.42% said other.
Father came in at 13.16%.
And children came in at 2.62%
this is showing that the mother does more
cooking than the men, this means that we will
have to make our cards more apt to women
than men.
When we make our cards this means that we
will have to make the cards designed to how
women are as they will be the ones mostly
cooking the food, though we will still do some
that are for men as well as there is still a high
percentage of them.
20. Question 5 – What is your favourite savoury meal?
There was a big group of food’s that people
liked, but the top three where Pasta, Quorn
14 Steak and Chips plus Pizza.
12 These are some dishes that we could include
in our cards.
10
8 We could also do some different meals will
pasta and bits of steak in and pizza with
6 chips, this is because both carnivores, vegans
4 and vegetarians can enjoy these meals.
2 This is good because we will be able to have
0 different cultured food, this will mean that
there is more variety for people.
Quorn Pizza Chips Pasta For example, Pasta is Italian, Steak and Chips is
Steak English and Pizza is American.
12 people decided that they enjoyed eating
quorn steak the most another popular choice
was chips with 9 people liking this the most.
Pizza and pasta was less popular with
responses from 6 & 7 people.
21. Question 6 – What is your favourite dessert?
As this question was an open question and there was a
9 comment box and there was lots of different
8 responses however I decided to pick the top 4
answers out the different responses given and
7 the top answers were toffee fudge cake which
was chosen by 8 people. Chocolate cake was
6 chosen by 7 people Fruit crumble was chosen by
5 6 people as was ice cream.
4 Seeing the range of these results shows the difference
3 to non-vegetarian and vegetarian. From these
responses I can identify and carry out more
2 research into the desserts. Using this question in
my survey let me find out the different desserts
1 that was the most popular allowing me to include
0 them in my recipe cards.
Toffee fudge Chocolate Crumble Ice cream As the vegetarians chose toffee fudge cake and
chocolate cake as there favourite dessert this will
cake cake mean that I should look into adding these recipes
into my recipe cards as my target audience will
be more interested in these.
If choosing to make chocolate cake I will add factors
that make it suitable for my audience such as
adding organic chocolate into the ingredients.
22. Question 7– How many people do you cook for?
25 out of 27 vegetarians and vegans took part in this
question the other 3 people skipped this question.
I found out from these results about vegetarians that most
vegetarians and vegans cook for 1, 2, and also 3 people.
And they are lesson likely to cook for 4 and 5 people.
The results came in with vegetarians/vegans cooking for 1
people is 28. These results show that vegetarians are less
likely to cook for more people. As I am going to base my
recipes on vegetarians I can use these survey results to
base how big my portions are going to be. I found out that
most vegetarians/vegans cook for 1-3 people instead of 5+.
Using these results can help me identify how big my dish is
going to be.
23. Question 8– Do you enjoy eating organic foods?
This question was answered by 27 vegetarians/vegans and
it wasn’t skipped by anyone.
I found out that 13 people answered with the answer yes
that they do enjoy eating organic foods this is 48%. 3
people answered that they don’t enjoy eating organic
foods and which was 11% and 11 people that are
vegetarians answered with sometimes they enjoy eating
organic food which was 40%.
Using these results can help me decide weather to include
organic foods in my recipe cards. From these results I can
identify that most people enjoy eating organic foods so
that I can include organic ingredients in my recipe cards.
Including organic foods into the recipes will mean that my
audience and vegetarians are benefiting from a healthier
lifestyle and also they're benefiting because the majority of
people chose that they enjoy eating organic foods.
24. Question 9 – Which countries food do you prefer?
From this question it shows that 27 vegetarians and vegans
answered it and 0 people skipped it.
My results from this question ‘which countries food do you
prefer?’ is asking what type of food would my audience
prefer to eat. I found out that 5 vegetarians which was 18%
preferred eating Italian this includes pasta, pizza and also
breads. I found out that 6 people which was 22% preferred
eating American food which includes chips, burgers.
Another popular vote was also Indian 6 people voted this
as there favourite preferred food. This food includes
curries and rice. English food was another popular choice
with 22% of people choosing this this food will include fish
and chips, English breakfast and also bangers and mash.
Finding out about these different choices can help me to
make a decision of what different dishes I can include in
my recipe cards and finding out which theme will be the
most popular.
25. Question 10 – What food do you eat the most?
This question was created to find out what food was eaten
the most by vegetarians and vegans.
The majority of the results show that more vegetarians
and vegans eat more vegetables than anything else.
A another popular choice from vegetarian and vegans
was meat however from this result I think that some
people misunderstood the question or accidently
pressed on meat. As I filtered my results into just
seeing vegetarians and vegans I am not going to
count that response as it is invalid. However I am
going to focus on the other responses which included
vegetables, Quorn and also fruit as the top 3 popular
choices.
Carrying out this question allowed me to find out what
vegetarians like eating. Using this source will let me
identify which will be the most popular food product
to use in my recipe cards. For example as vegetables
is the most popular choice I will try and include
recipes with vegetables in.
27. After looking through all the feedback from our food questionnaire, we can see that all the results are quite scattered
and varied but not too much, this can be because of gender, age, and what food type they are. Each question
helped us to find out what we needed to know about the people we are making the cards for and influence for what
kinds of food we could include on the cards.
The feedback that we were given has given us a greater idea of what we can put on our recipe cards, it has also
helped us to find out who our target audience and the audience profile.
Looking at the research we found out that more men than women do the household cooking, this has given us a
greater idea of who will be using our cards. This will mean that we will have to make our cards quite feminine but
also do some masculine ones for the men. To do this we would use feminine colours, for example, pink, purple, and
red which are all commonly known as feminine, we would also use a feminine font, for example, sans-serif, this is
because of all of the flicks which make it girly. For the men we could use colours like, blue, orange, or green, maybe
even purple if we were going for a classy look on the card this is because these colours are categorized as
masculine. The most popular gender for vegetarians was also Female, although there was still a high percentage in
men that where also vegetarian so again we will use feminine cards and do some masculine ones. Or create some
cards that fit for both genders.
We also found out during our research that the most popular food type is for Carnivore’s though we aren’t aloud to
do them kinds of recipes so we will have to stick to vegetarians, this will limit our audience but we could do them for
vegans as well to make up for this. To make these cards we will include recipes like quorn
steak, chips, Pasta, salads, and pizza, Etc.
‘What is your favourite meal’ has lots of different answers, though I managed to narrow it down to the most popular
ones, and I found out that steak and chips, pasta, and pizza where the favourite foods of vegans and
vegetarians, we found add some of these foods too our recipes.
28. All in all I feel that this survey helped us a lot to find out all the information that we needed and we wouldn’t have been able
to get the information without Survey Monkey.
I think that our research was very successful as we gathered a range of different results ranging from different ages as well
as different genders. We also got a lot of feedback from vegetarians as well as vegans and carnivore which gave us a lot of
information and help that we can use when creating our vegetarian recipe cards. We found out what vegetarians eat the
most and we identified a range of different foods that we can include for our recipes.
I think to improve our research we could’ve maybe asked a different range of people such as people over 30 and 40 as we
didn’t collect as many results for this age range. I think to improve this I think we could go out and target people who are
within of the age range of 20+ this means we would get a much wider range of results from different ages. Many of our
results came from people in 16-20 category. I also think we could’ve based our survey more on vegetarians as these are the
results that we was focusing on.
To do our research we used a online site which was free to use called ‘Survey Monkey’, this enabled us to create 10
questions for the general public to fill out online which was simple and easy for them to do. We advertised our survey on
social networking sites such as facebook and twitter although that there is a restricted age range for these websites as they
are mostly aimed at 16-20 year olds.
Overall I think that our research was good because we found out everything that we needed to know in order to get the right
idea of the people that we are going to be targeting to make the card, though if we were aloud to have more questions on
the survey I think we could have found out even more about our audience and gone in to more depth as our questions had
to be quick and simple.
To make the survey better I also think that we should have missed out the option ‘Other’ and ‘Carnivore’ on the question
‘What are you?’ so that we had just Vegans and Vegetarians as we have more Carnivores and Other than anything else.