Food recalls - a domaining opportunity
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Barry Goggin December 18, 2008
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Food recalls have been increasing in the last few years with some
very high profile cases. While I am not a fan of taking advantage of
other people’s misery, in this case rapid communication to the public
of any problems with the food supply is a good thing. So lets take a
look at the opportunities for domaining in this area.
As our population grows and we become more and more dependent on the
food supply chain, the quality of intensively produced food is
critical. With large distribution chains, the impact of any problem
with the food supply has widespread implications.
Using Google Trends to look at food recalls
My first stop was to Google Trends. I have featured this before and
it is well worth checking out to confirm any ideas you have about
something becoming more popular.
I looked at “food recall” first and used “domain name” as a
benchmark. Remember that Google Trends shows a relative number, not an
absolute number. This means you need to compare it to something and
preferably something you use for every comparison in this tool.
As you can see there is one major burst of search activity and if
you look closely, you will see some smaller bursts of activity.
Next I looked at “meat recall” and “beef recall”. Here the traffic
is much less but notice the blips in 2007 and 2008. Notice a trend?
I also looked at “pet food recall”. This was one that was reported
widely in the press and on TV. Notice how these are occurring in recent
years.
FDA data is free to use
OK, I talked before about mining government data. Food recalls are handled by the FDA and they have a website specifically for recalls including food.
I took the years 2008 and 2000 and counted the number of Class 1
recalls. Class 1 are the most serious. I didn’t manually count these. I
used a trick with Excel to have it count for me.
Simply put I copied the list on this FDA recall page for 2008,
pasted into Notepad and saved the file. I did the same for the year
2000. I then went to Excel and used the Data import from file function.
Having pasted into row 1, I could just scroll down to the last row and
the row number equals the number of recall notices.
Create a unique graph
For 2008, there were 293 class 1 recall notices while for 2000,
there were 84. This is another piece of information to support the
increasing number of issues with the food supply. Also if you remember
my post on creating graphs from government data, here is a perfect
opportunity to create a graph that will get noticed the next time the
media are covering food recalls.
So here are two tools that help contribute to the idea that food
recalls are on the rise and so predictive domaining would suggest this
may be an area in which to invest.Further research is probably needed
and also a search for appropriate domain names.
Develop the domain
FDA data is free to use so you have immediate content should you
wish to develop such a domain and I have already shown you how you
could make a unique graph relevant to such a website.
As always use your own judgement. Have any plays in this area? |